“AFTER HOURS” was created by the contemporary artist Peter Milton in 2019. This graphic depicting a scene outside of the Louvre in Paris was drawn on a special tablet taking up to one year to complete and then printed digitally in an edition of 70. This impression is signed, dated, titled, and inscribed “36/70” – the 36 impression of 70. The printed image size is 23 x 37 inches and the paper size is 30.75 x 44 inches.
“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
"In my latest print, AFTER HOURS, the day's museum visitors are filing into the Cour Carrée du Louvre in Paris as they leave the museum at closing time. Outside, the dusk is harvesting the full luminosity of a rising moon. The evening's birds flock and swoop to celebrate the arrival of a glowing night's sky.
At the back of the courtyard, the contemporary retreating figures seem unperturbed by the foreground figures which are rattling in from an earlier time to join the fray. With the unexpected jolt of these anachronistic fragments, I am hoping to tilt the scene into a large and perhaps mysterious scale of space and time. That sense of cinematic breadth and urban grandeur seems to have become a favorite theme of mine.
The invading figures in the foreground are borrowed from the 16th century engravings of Albrecht Dürer. Four brass players borrowed from an engraving of Dürer’s contemporary, Heinrich Hildegreve, join the Dürer group. They are Renaissance sackbut players, and they too are taking an after-hours break and drifting through the centuries into our present. I discovered them in an elegant collection of engravings honoring both Dürer and his followers, known as 'The Little Masters'” - 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 to 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.
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.