Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Peter Young
American; 20th-century
New York, NY: Craig Starr Gallery
72%
#21-1970. 1970. Acrylic on canvas stretched on ponderosa pine branches with jute twine
The canvas of this painting is stretched over thick wild pine branches, which gives its general phiz an air of contingency and uncontainedness. With these paintings (there's a whole series which he started in the mountains of Costa Rica living with the natives and finished in Utah), Young best marshaled this contingency with images that are on the stiffer side; these more easily (playfully) negate the wildness of their supports, rather than simply indulging in it. For this reason, #21 is the best of the lot, the manufactured vibrancy of its two main colors (orange, blue) sitting oddly against the earthy brown behind it (which refers to the brown of the stick-stretcher hidden behind the canvas). If the overall conceit is a tad slight — it's easy to "get" that there's something cool to juxtaposing geometry with untamed natural forms — the result is undeniably handsome. (2024)
New York, NY: Craig Starr Gallery
66%
#9-1970. 1970. Acrylic on canvas stretched on ponderosa pine branches with jute twine
It's unclear what this gains from its diamond format (and anything that departs from a traditionally accepted format — in this case the floor-parallel square canvas — must gain from that departure), but it is clear what it gains from the bulk and awkwardness that its unconventional support (pine branches) provides: randomness, which the cosmical orderliness of the painted element both supports and undercuts. Of the paintings in this series, the slightly better seem to be the more angular, the slightly worse (like this) the more curvy, but it's a rather thin margin that separates them — they're all of a part. As with some of the other works from this series, Young has included in this one a nice little bit of miscellany or errata — that dash mark in the bottom right loop — that ends up asserting an element of specificity onto the forms around it. (2024)
New York, NY: Craig Starr Gallery
62%
#5-1970. 1970. Acrylic on canvas stretched on ponderosa pine branches with jute twine
It seems that young got the idea for the left-sloping lines from the slight leftward tilt of the wonky stretcher bars, which I think is a misunderstanding (on the part of the artist himself) of how these paintings work. Namely, it's not direct correspondence between the structure and the image upon it, but rather general, suggestive affinity that makes the paintings in this series work. The "picture" itself is actually better than some of the others in the series — that leftward slope ain't bad, and it's a nice touch that the one line is continuous through the three planes while none of the others break out of their parallel little provinces — but it's how it works in the context of the work as a whole that gives me slight pause. An object like this wants to work against nature as a means of getting back to it; this painting works through nature, and so seems to move away. (2024)