Peter Sorrell
And On That Day That, 1996
colored pencil on paper
13 x 8 11/16 inches; 33 x 22.1 centimeters
Louis Stern Fine Arts will open the exhibition Trilogy III: Leza Lidow, Farhad Ostovani, Peter Sorrell on January 9, 1997. Trilogy III is the third in a series of 3-artist exhibitions that Louis Stern has staged over the last year.
[In Leza Lidow's work] the scene is complete with the debris and detritus of human waste. Fish float belly-up above the garbage, but the former beauty of the river is evident in the way the water itself and its living foliage are lovingly painted.
Farhad Ostvani, was born in northern Persia and raised in the capital city Tehran. He currently lives in France, though he travels extensively. Ostovani first exhibited his paintings in the early 1970’s and has since shown his work in Los Angeles, New York, Washington and abroad. His inspiration is nature, but his approach to the natural world is unique. He applies a serial process to a painterly, even gestural, technique. His current focus is the Cypress series on view at Louis Stern Fine Arts. Each of the 16 works in this series is fresh, as if it were the artist’s first experience of his subject. Yet the pieces come together for the viewer as a single modulated experience, each Cypress a passage of music, flowing one into another.
Peter Sorrell, an Englishman who has resided in France for many years, is an expert draughtsman, who’s talent is at the service of a kind of visual poetry. He draws nudes and still lifes, colored pencil is his media. His subjects occupy spaces that are closed and defined by table tops and drapery, but they are also expansive and suggestive. The drapery falls and flows, the table tops are white against white walls. The textures of each surface are rendered with care, they are delicate and almost fragile. The focus of the composition is presented for our contemplation, a glass vase of wilted flowers on a rumpled tablecloth, the sunlight casting a shadow. The image is somehow filled with emotion. Beyond the sad flowers, every plane, every passage, seems to speak.