I missed the opening for Peter Bill’s “Color Obsession” at Traders of Babylon Art Gallery last Friday night, but not for want of trying. I just hadn’t expected to find a gallery behind a jewelry store. Standing in front of the window an hour before the scheduled event, I could find so indication there was a show inside. Two days later, in daylight, I saw the foot-square cardboard sign taped up on the glass of a closed doorway next door, a nonchalant comment saying people should use the jewelry store doorway. Beneath it was the geometric swirl of purple and blue that the galley had been using to advertize the show. Inside, an 8 by 12 inch version was on sale, framed and unframed with the title “Two, too.”
The jewelry store door opened with an electronic buzz as the gallery attendants combined jewelry business with their art display, leading me into the back room where vivid colors blazed from the walls like strobe lights.
Friday night’s opening was a success, they said, considering the weather and the World Trade Center disaster in New York. They estimated as many as 70 people had come to meet Peter Bill, sample wine, snacks and the startling array of art work. The galley even sold a painting the first night.
While Bill called his style a “technically precise geometric” more goes on inside them. Even saying he creates a sense of balance and cohesion, doesn’t quite describe the result. Central themes leaped from each painting, jolting the viewer with certain odd twists. In one painting, he used a organic shape to emphasize the hard lines of what might be called a jigsaw puzzle effect. Only here, the lines are straight, with sharp edges and clearly defined boundaries. In another piece, he paints changing blue in chunks of varying shades that lay side by side and create an impressionist solid at a distance.
His work struck me because it lacked the normal inaccessibility of tradition geometrical painting. Somehow in all these shapes and shades and angles, he has managed to create atmosphere– each work bearing a mood or sense of space. It is jarring and challenging, and still attractive.
Nor has Bill stuck to the rigid basic color structures that make most geometrical paintings uninspiring. Each piece revels in its own color theme. In one piece, Bill used earth browns and tans for an American Indian effect. In others, he plays off 1960s psychedelic, even using overall structures like in “Peace Sign.”
While the phrase “New Age” brings up bad connotations with some people, here it is relevant and refreshing, as he dances around their themes without committing himself to them.
Bill, a British painter, currently lives in Weehawken, and has exhibited in England and the U.S. In 1992, he put on a one-man show at Cooper Gallery in Jersey City, and more recently appeared in “Love & Chaos” at the Arts Center on first, in the “Catholicism” exhibition sponsored by the Progressive Culture Works, and in “America” at the Williams Center in Rutherford.
“Color Obsession” will run until March 15 at Traders of Babylon Art Gallery from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.