New paintings unveiled at train station

Currently at the Ridgewood Avenue train station are new landscape oil paintings by Montclair resident Peter Trondsen.

Titled “Spring Tour 2026,” there are 26 works, but only nine are new. The others were seen at his train station show last April. A 1984 Glen Ridge High School graduate, Trondsen is also the new curator for train station exhibits.

He did a lot of paintings in the last part of 2026 and most are in this show, he said. Perhaps it should be noted that his father, Robert, a commercial artist, died in November and recently had a posthumous show at the station.

There seems to be an emerging change in Trondsen’s later painting, something he acknowledges. It can be seen in Menagerie of Trees. It is different because the viewpoint is stressed. Often Trondsen paints distant objects, but here is a dense group of trees, nearly overhead, looking up into them. Shards of blue sky peek through. On the title card is a red dot indicating a sale.

“A friend was surprised that it sold,” Trondsen said. “I never looked at it up close. It has a lot of perspective. I think with a lot of my paintings, if you take a second look, there’s more.”

He used to obsess over all his brush strokes, he said, and then he was told to take a step back. He did and began brushing more freely.

“My newer paintings are opening up,” he said. “All the newer paintings are.”

There is a painting called Gran Torino. It is radical for Trondsen because it is of a red car and the vanishing point is not some distant shore, but the in-your-face grillwork of an approaching car.

“What I did with that one is I painted the sky and landscape, but it needed something,” he said. “So I put in the Gran Torino. We had one when I was a kid in the ‘70s. It was brown, but I thought the red would work better. I don’t think the brown would have worked.”

Although he may do preparatory sketches or doodles, Tronsden works from photographs. That is unfortunate for a painting like The Palisades, the Jersey rock formation along the Hudson River, as seen from New York. From across the river, the painting looks like a dense stand of trees. Up close there is delicate color in those black rocks. But you have to get maybe too close to see this.

“I try not to use black,” Trondsen said. “You can make it with Prussian blue, alizarin crimson and maybe a little Van Dyke brown. I do use black, but it’s a heavy color and can take over a painting. It’s easier to lighten those colors than black.”

He paints with Mars black and ivory black. Other colors he uses are sap green, cadmium yellow and red, and phthalo blue.

He 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.

“My last show had a lot of smaller paintings,” he said. “It’s about taking chances and not being afraid. Sometimes it comes out great, sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t do too much underpainting either.”

There is one painting, Trondsen’s most recent, yet to be hung or titled, that is markedly different from others in the show. It is from an evening photograph of a lake with the sunset removed. But it is the landscape jutting into the foreground to the left that draws the eye into the distance.

Tronsden’s paintings ordinarily do not control the eye as this one does. This one has a strong use of perspective.

Spring Tour 2026 closes April 22 and moves to Center Stage Gallery, Montclair, April 25-May 25. Anyone interested in exhibiting at the train station can email Trondsen at peter@petertrondsen.com. Please provide the type of medium, number of pieces and exhibition dates preferred.