- Peter Riegler
- Still Crazy After All These Years, 1978
- acrylic painting
- 27.5 x 29.5 in
The format of my art is fantasy, a fantasy that comes from the real world, represented t through symbols. For the last four years, my images have found themselves in a dramatic setting with stage, curtains, lighting, and props. Somehow, the stage, unlike the outside world, allows a certain freedom. A freedom to cut people off at the neck, limbs stopping at the joints with props shooting out from all directions, all of these images floating in an enclosed, trapped space. I have even taken liberties with the space itself, making the depth so shallow the images hardly seem to fit. Throughout the entire episode of each painting, I fight between color and intent, or the message each work represents. I believe that the color and the images together create a macabre atmosphere, something that the viewer must deal with in his or her own mind. These paintings may communicate more to the artist than to the viewer because of their personal nature and because they are more than simply this aesthetic of color or the aesthetic of surface control. Because they do take on such personal symbols, these works may be considered almost surreal, or fantastic in the sense of fantasy.
For the last three or four years, I have been working with acrylics on paper. Still Crazy After All These Years is a story, a play, a letter, some sort of communication to the viewer that I am still kicking myself in the head; still spitting (the antics of a child) while I feel the unbelievable magic of getting older. The symbols here are obvious, the story maybe not so.
- Collections: South Carolina Arts Commission State Art Collection