Maine-based artist Peter Walls has created a stunning assortment of never-before-exhibited shaped paintings for his solo-exhibition Memory Palace. While the artist has traversed landscapes around New York’s Lake Ontario, Louisiana, New Hampshire and Vermont, the Maine environment has inspired this new body of work. Memories of the artist’s experiences exploring varied landscapes infuse these works-—the wonderment of the terrain and its flora, along with the emotions stirred by each of these locations. Walls states, “My relationship with the Maine landscape through these 20 paintings are meant to slowly invite you into my world. We live a meandering existence, never a straight line, and I want to evoke both the winding paths we take through the forest and life itself.”

These paintings are not traditional depictions of specific Maine locations, but rather composite creations informed by the visual memories of information encountered in these places that, as the artist suggests are “personal memory palaces”. The focal point of the show is a large-scale, multi-paneled composition titled Bulwark (Schoodic Peninsula) that spans 17 feet and was created in response to ZAM’s gallery. The viewer is immersed in a vibrant landscape that is brimming with moss and lichen covered rocks and strategically placed fallen trees that seems to lure one into the scene.

The artist’s skill as a painter and muralist is clearly evident in the exhibition, by the scale in which he works and the utility of creating multiple panels that join together in a seamless composition. Walls accentuates the spirit of these imagined locations through the heightened color used to depict these natural details and the silhouettes created by the forms. “My use of color is intuitive, yet grounded in my journeys in the woods and waters of Maine.   I am not in any way photo-realistically rendering what I experience but letting my emotion of place and the magic it reveals come forward;   I want you to feel my landscapes through my high-spirited palette,  like a memory of a journey one has once made themselves.” Says Walls.   The artist confidently shifts from large-scale paintings to an assortment of 16 small-sized compositions, some as small as 12” tall, that enliven an entire gallery.

George Kinghorn

Executive Director & Curator • Zillman Art Museum University of Maine