GLEN RIDGE — A father and son painting exhibit is currently on view at the Ridgewood Avenue train station. Titled “Shared Visions,” there are 22 oil paintings, predominately land and seascapes, by Peter Trondsen and his father, Robert, a former freelance Madison Avenue commercial artist who died last year at the age of 88. Both had lived in the borough.
Peter, a 1984 Glen Ridge High School graduate, resides in Montclair. He put his brushes aside and went into information technology (IT) to earn a living, returning to painting during the pandemic. Robert, after retiring, moved to the Hudson Valley. His paintings are more polished and lyrical than that of his son who, nevertheless, has a more expansive view of pictorial space.
“In the last six years of his life, working with my dad, we started talking about different techniques,” Peter said. “It was like a lesson from a master.”
In Robert’s “Cloud Scene,” there is a band of dense white clouds across the canvas and along the horizon. The mastery of the composition is above this band where the clouds seem lighter in weight by feathering out giving the band a weightiness.
Peter’s work is more subtle. In “Belmar Beach,” there are details, a small portion of sandy beach, a jetty barely seen and way up in the sky, one small white cloud. But you really can’t call them details. They’re really not, but more like glimpses. They give the piece an introspective quality. Peter has said he would like to get more detail into his work now that he feels he is becoming looser in his approach. He also feels that his compositions are improving and his canvases are getting bigger.
Whereas not everyone would notice the details in his work, Robert’s work displays something for everyone to immediately see. It’s out there and, since he has your attention, concentrates on color, as he does in an exceptional landscape that, unfortunately, was untitled. In this painting, there is a group of trees, just in front of a stream, flowing at midrange across the composition. A similar composition is used for “Magic Meadow,” with a stream behind a row of trees.
“Beaver Lake,” by the younger Trondsen, provides a sense of the topography, with trees massed on each side of the lake and the varying depth of the water suggested with subtle changes of color saturation.
“My friend has a house up there,” he said. “This is the view I took a picture of. I love it so much, I had to paint a picture of it.”
He said both he and his father worked from photographs.
“When I started, it was mostly from my imagination,” he said.
In the exhibit, Robert has four landscapes. A lovely one, of a mountain, making that five landscapes, will be hung by the Opening Night reception. Peter has two landscapes and four of water, either the ocean or lake.
“I got into the water-mode of painting,” he said. “One of them is from a magazine, but my friends send me pictures of water.”
There is a charming painting of a rabbit, by Peter, titled, “Rabbit Season.”
“At the very beginning of spring, my landlord hadn’t gotten the lawn cut and we had a million rabbits,” he said.
Consequently, Peter took a picture of the wary beast and, with a brush, immortalized it.
Lessons he learned from his father were, if you have a good composition and good values, you have a good painting each time.
“And he always told me not to put my horizon line directly in the center of the painting,” Peter said. “Composition was a big topic with us.”
Curiously, Robert seemed to tease this concern because, while he did not place the horizon in the center, a number of his paintings have a line of trees or a stream there, emphasizing his concern with perspective, as he ordinarily would for a Madison Avenue client.
“He was an amazing artist,” Peter said. “He has some great paintings.”
This is true enough, but one thing a viewer might also feel is how much color pumps an expressiveness into a picture. Both artists use a palette of subdued colors, which contribute to the feeling that the image is contained and subjective.
The Opening Night reception is Friday, Sept. 18, from 6 to 9 p.m.
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