TSUNAMI is an archival digital print created in 2015. This original print was directly drawn into the computer by Peter Milton and printed digitally. It is signed, titled, and dated in pencil. The edition is 70 prints - this impression is inscribed “43/70”. The image size is 23 x 37 inches and the paper size 30 x 44 inches. This item is new and has never been in a frame or exposed to sunlight. Our gallery represents the artist Peter Milton.
“This image was suggested to me by Mike Leigh's cinematic account of Turner having himself tied to a ship's mast in order to feel what a storm at sea actually feels like in order to really paint it. It is also a reminder of my own summer of 1950 working on an oil tanker off the Pacific coast and a treasured evocation of a few of my own pitching and yawing storms.
A tsunami is rolling in from a mysterious seismic event. Riding out the great wave is a grand three-masted schooner. On the deck, an intent painter is at work. The name on the boat tells us it is JMW Turner, and his paintings confirm it. Foundering in the tumultuous white water of a storm surge is a small disintegrating sailboat with six boaters caught on a nautical spree. One man is clearly facing a losing battle.
In the sails of the small boat is a beckoning, flag-waving man. If the painter is Turner, then this must be his most devoted admirer, the critic, John Ruskin, cheering him on as only this man of letters could do. By now it is clear that the boaters must be some Turner colleagues from The Royal Academy in London. Manning the boat's tiller is a young man who was later Turner's most notable competition, John Constable. At his feet is inscribed the name, Effie Gray, a reference to the pre-Raphaelite, once RA president, John Everett Millais. In turn, this boat's name brings us back to Ruskin whose beautiful Effie was later absconded from Ruskin by Millais. But that's another story.
Here Turner is the fierce hero with his flying dutchman of an imagined schooner riding out the savagery of nature and the vicissitudes of Art. Today, it now appears that it was Turner himself who had become the tsunami”. - Peter Milton
Peter Milton was born in Pennsylvania in 1930. He studied for two years at the Virginia Military Institute and completed his BFA in 1954 at Yale University under Josef Albers and Gabor Peterdi. Milton continued his studies at Yale and in 1961 received his MFA. From 1961-1968 Milton lived in Baltimore where he taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art. It was during this period that Peter Milton took an avid interest in printmaking. He had his first solo show in 1963 and quickly started winning awards internationally. Over the course of fifty years, Milton has created intricate visual worlds in more than 130 prints, many of which took over a year to make.
“Working in layers, Milton begins with drawings based on people and places, with nods to Western art history and culture. He is a master of the appropriated image, a term that may conjure Andy Warhol and his Pop Art comrades. But Milton steps further back in history, avoiding the Pop sense of cool advertising and popular culture references. Instead, a broader cultural past is tapped through historical photographs of key players, architecture, and locales, which he reinvents by hand. He adds content drawn from his life as an avid reader – always with multiple possible interpretations – thus incorporating deeper meaning in his cinematic worlds. Elements of Greek mythology, classical music, art history, and history coalesce in his images, which embrace the messiness, sorrow, and elation that is life. One is hard-pressed to imagine a more erudite, skilled, passionate, and cheeky soul.
In addition to a storied career in printmaking, since 2007 Milton has fearlessly produced artwork digitally. He now creates images using Adobe Photoshop in files consisting of more than two thousand layers, which are printed both as digital prints on paper and, for display on Led lightboxes, on translucent, white-coated film called Duratrans. These intricate pictures are the logical next step; they carry his method of layered visual elements in etching forward to the digital realm. He continues to explore and always looks to the next thing: ‘I feel it is the trajectory of a never-ending adventure.’” – T. L. Johnson and A. Shafer
Peter Milton has work in over 200 collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, MA; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; the British Museum, London; the Tate Gallery, London; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, among others.