New Pete Wagner: Race Point

Peter Wagner, Race Point, 2018, approx. 20"x 16"

For my birthday, my amazing wife gifted me with this amazing painting by our good friend Pete Wagner. The subject is Race Point Beach. Situated a couple miles across the dunes from P-town, it's one of our favorite places in New England. This painting employs some serious impasto, adding three dimensional texture to the piece. The waves are actually wavy. Impasto paintings take a long time to dry, and this painting is so new that we can still smell the oil paint.

Pete told me that to him the painting is like a horn solo. I didn't ask him what he meant by that, since I always try to formulate my own take on things. But running with the musical theme, I replied that to me it's like a piano solo by Monk. Here's why. Monk was a master of logical rhythmic and harmonic development. His playing unfolds with supreme, if counter-intuitive, logic. But he also liked to mess with things. Monk loved dissonant chords. And somehow these chords made the prettiest songs even prettier, or at least more affecting. He called this aesthetic "ugly beauty." After you get habituated to Monk's sound, simple, straightforward "beauty beauty" just don't cut it no more.

But here's the connection to Pete's work. Monk would often interrupt an intricate, syncopated solo with a straight, several-octave run down the keyboard. No nuance, no variation, no syncopation. In other words, these runs were just plain wrong. But they are part of what makes Monk Monk. It takes confidence to dispel of propriety. For the crashing waves, Pete employs very broad strokes that deviate from the more traditional "painterliness" of the top half of the painting. I guess there's no other way to put it than to say that the waves are in your face to an extent that is just wrong in that Monkian sense. I love it. And I should add that the technique is especially apt here, since, in a storm, those Race Point waves are nothing if not rude and in your face.