Peter di Gesu, currently residing in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was born in Los Angeles, California, and received an MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Peter di Gesu currently exhibits in commercial galleries in Denver, Colorado, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has exhibited in museum-type venues in California, Japan, and India, and his work is in permanent collections in the Oakland Art Museum and the Pasadena Art Museum, both in California, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. His paintings are held in various private collections and corporations in the United States and Canada.
If you are interested in more information on a painting or exhibit, contact Peter di Gesu in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at:
+1 902 429-6538
Artist Statement
“These paintings are initially inspired by the space, light, color, and forms of the landscapes that I have visited. Each year I spend time travelling in the western and southwestern United States, as well as in the Maritime Canadian provinces, taking photos and sketching places that catch my attention. Sometimes the original photo or sketch will be a point of departure, with the finished painting bearing little resemblance to the original place. In the end, what matters is how the colors, forms, lines, and illusion of space work together on the canvas.
There is something universal about our connection with the earth and sky, the vastness and the expansiveness of space that pulls us beyond our own limited perceptions; this is what I hope is communicated in these paintings.”
Peter di Gesu
“Peter di Gesu’s work is manifested largely in terms of mystical landscapes—vivid, highly simplified mountains and rivers, vast spaces—done in a time-consuming technique involving many layers of paint. Landscape, space, and color are executed with a crisp, precise line set in surrealistic airlessness and balanced in vaguely symmetrical compositions.”
“Peter di Gesu is a marvelous draughtsman, and his drawings and paintings take one on a fantastic journey through some of the wildest country ever imagined at the end of a brush. Strange cliffs, unprecedented seas, plants, and birds such as no scientist has ever recorded—these are some of the elements in this remarkable painter’s universe.”
“Peter di Gesu’s finely described landscapes seem to exist in their own realities, neither in the present nor the past, but suspended between waking and dreaming. They drift along the margins of memory. Their meanings are conjugated by the interaction of viewers who, by experiencing their painted surfaces, allow another reality to emerge somewhere beyond the picture plane and into the illusory space that is a metaphor of existence and thought.”