Photo Courtesy of Peter Trondsen 'Mount Hood,' an oil painting by borough resident Peter Trondsen, currently on view at the Ridgewood Avenue Train Station.
‘Mount Hood,’ an oil painting by borough resident Peter Trondsen, currently on view at the Ridgewood Avenue Train Station.
There is an oil painting exhibit currently at the Ridgewood Avenue train station.
What is overall remarkable about the exhibit, called “Spring Awakenings,” is that the artist, borough resident Peter Trondsen, worked from photographs, but his paintings do not appear that way. They haven’t the artificial look of paintings of photographs. One would suppose that Trondsen breathed something of himself into the work.
“During the pandemic, I found my old paints and started painting again,” he said in a recent interview. “I went to the School of Visual Arts and took a Mac course and it changed my life. I wanted to be an artist like my father, but loved the Mac. Painting has always been in the back of my mind. It’s a pure joy.”
Trondsen, a Glen Ridge High School graduate, class of 1984, works in IT. He said he doesn’t stand in his backyard and paint. He tries to be accurate, but sometimes “gets into the mood of painting” and keeps going.
It’s good that he got into the mood for the painting, “Mt. Hood” which is in the exhibit. It is an especially effective landscape painting. The mountain erupts above a long stand of trees which sit just beyond a lake shoreline which slightly curves, and with the color, suggests an astronaut’s view of the earth. There is a sensitive coloring of the trees rimming the lake and in most of the exhibit, the coloring is effective. Mt. Hood is particularly forbidding with its icy ridges applied with a palette knife.
Most of the paintings are small, but there are exceptions. “Mt. Hood” is 18” by 18” and you don’t even realize it’s square. “Morning Clouds Burning Off,” is 22” by 28” and remarkable. It is a mysterious blossom-like cloud in the thrall of a new day. Of course, it conjures Georgia O’Keefe, but here a problem with the show is evident. There are no dates for the paintings. A viewer would like to survey Trondsen’s development.
“Palisades’ is another large-scale painting. Together with “Morning Clouds Burning Off,” it is a bit of a surprise. It is spacious, with few elements but variety within them. Trondsen’s compositions are durable. What other word is there for them?
“Backyard Sunset” is a triangular composition of trees. The sunset is gently colored with orange and pinks. The trees are a leafless entanglement. The picture is a wild conflagration with the flame-like trees ascending out of the picture.
“I’ve developed a style,” Trondsen said. “I work fast with heavy brush strokes. Van Gogh said that if you start a painting, you should finish before walking away.”
Trondsen said he was influenced by the Impressionists and had to get over using straight lines and trying to be perfect.
It is interesting to see, in these paintings, the similarity of Mother Nature’s parts and how Tronsden is defining the painting by their interaction. The smallish “Red Skies Tonight” but especially “FlatIrons” is an example. What is the foreground? High grasses? Dried reeds? In the background, a hardened landscape. For some reason, these elements seem more alike than different. What is the picture saying? That time passes for all things?
“Mid-winter Blues” is interesting because the scale of the elements is a puzzle. What is the size of the leafless trees surrounding the pine or are they not trees but weeds?
“Central Avenue Trees” seems to be a more advanced painting and Tronsden confirmed this. In this work, there are five Impressionistic trees leaning as if affected by an outside force. It’s the only painting in the show that isn’t self-contained, so to speak. It suggests something living within a larger environment.
There are also three small paintings of dogs. “Charley” may be the most effective because it conveys the personality of a real dog. “Mogey” also has personality, but relies on the closeness the dog appears to be from the picture plane. This dog is in your face, literally, and what person doesn’t understand that.
“Charley” could be a seascape and it seems that most of the paintings exhibited are not what they might appear to be to the casual viewer. To be sure, there are a few paintings with which more could have been done. But for the most part, the paintings are not what they first appear and deserve consideration.
“Spring Awakenings” will be at the train station until May 26. The time the station is open varies. There is an opening reception April 26, 5-9 p.m. Trondsen’s work can also be seen at: petertrondsen.com
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