Memory, Nostalgia, and Nature Serve as Shared Inspiration for Two Complementary Artists
Though Peter Ramon and Loren Myhre work independently, their practices are inspired by many of the same themes, including memory, nostalgia, and the natural world.
Those shared inspirations make for an intriguing pairing. Their respective recent works are featured together in an exhibition at Fred.Giampietro Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. If you didn’t know better, you might think all of the artworks were created by a single artist.
Myhre contributed paintings, drawings, and sculptures to the show, and it’s easy to spot the repetition of forms and colors across mediums—see, for instance, his mixed-media sculptures Efi and Efy (both 2016). But visual similarities also exist between the two artists, as in Myhre’s New Look Kicks (2016) and Ramon’s Untitled (2016). Both are colorful and abstract, laced with bold brushstrokes, curving lines, and circular shapes.
According to the artists, these work were inspired by nature, imagination, and the often blurry space between perception and memory. As Ramon has said of his work, “My paintings are abstract, informed by nature, comprised of memory, sideways glances, fleeting thoughts…and unrelated meanderings.”
Myhre’s connection to the natural world is even more crucial to his artistic development. The child of a gardener and horticulturalist, he spent many days helping his father tend the plants and flowers in the family greenhouse—a “laboratory for the cultivation of beauty that could exist apart from understanding or explanation,” he has said. “Working in the greenhouses presented a wordless world of possibility and freedom.”
Youth amid such greenery helped pave the way for Myhre’s fruitful career as a sculptor and painter. It’s unsurprising, then, to learn that many of his mixed-media sculptures were created with found materials and industrial scrap. After all, he has called art making a “restorative process,” one undoubtedly brimming with the aforementioned possibility and freedom. In fact, Ramon relies on a similar type of creativity. “Like most artists,” he has said, “I draw upon life experience, nature and the world around me. The tools I use, the approaches I take, have mostly to do with how I interpret those things at that particular time.”
—Bridget Gleeson
Peter Ramon & Loren Myhre’s recent works are on view at Fred.Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, May 21–Jun. 18, 2016.
