Paintings in the Studio

I have always thought my studio time is like a meditation – it’s just that the time painting goes so fast. Even if l miss a day in the studio l feel l need to draw, it’s like somehow trying to document your day. - Peter Wegner 2021

Peter Wegner’s works are compelling and poignant representations of moments experienced. 

His revered and renowned oil paintings of the battered and worn armchairs that occupy his workspace are masterful renderings of monumental forms that consist of emptiness. Each of these chairs bears the marks and scars of their particular history, and through Wegner’s close observation and reverence for his subject, we feel the sitter profoundly present in the representation of their absence.

As Robert Nelson perceptively writes: ‘Wegner’s way of painting is congruent with the subject matter. The irregularity of the old chairs is painterly in itself, with tears and incidents riddling their form. The tendency of the upholstery to break up or gather a patina of grazes and bumps compares with Wegner’s idiom, which is battered by the brush, full of movement and change, a demonstrative give and take with thrust and slide that works happily with the weathered textures of the furniture.’

Peter’s recent exhibition showcased an exquisite series of recent armchair paintings as magnificent large-scale portraits in oil.