SAXTONS RIVER — Main Street Arts (MSA) announced it will be hosting an exhibition of the watercolors of Saxtons River's John S. “Jack” Peters, in a one-man show titled “Crossings.”
The show will be on display through March 28 at MSA's gallery at 35 Main Street in Saxtons River. There will be a free public reception at the gallery on March 17, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. and all are welcome.
According to MSA's Margo Ghia, “Jack and Susie Peters have been essential members of the Saxtons River creative community for decades. Jack's beautiful photography and jewelry work is well known in the area. It is such a treat for us to introduce our audience to his water colors.”
Peters was born in Springfield, Mass., in 1944. Moving around in early childhood, he and his family settled in Nantucket as year-round residents in the mid-1950s. There he hunted and fished and it was there that he and his friends found themselves the subjects of famed photographer Alfred Eisenstadt.
Peters says, “The relatively few years of my life that I lived and worked on Nantucket play an outsized role in many of these paintings.”
Titles such as “Off Tuckernuck,” “Eel Point,” and “Moors End Farm” refer to the island and the memories they evoke, “Fleeting but recurring images of roads, power lines, transformers, cars, boats, and the ocean.”
Peters would go on to get degrees in English from Lawrence University and Boston University. Settling in Saxtons River in the late 1960's with his “college sweetheart, Susie,” Peters says that both “the years and the village have been kind to us.” He made a career as a teacher of English at Vermont Academy, Keene State, and The Community College of Vermont.
In addition to teaching, Peters explored his artistic side. Inspired by Eisenstadt, he would open an art photography studio in Saxtons River and also become well known as a maker of custom furniture and jewelry.
“Most of the fine art photography I have done over the years was traditional silver halide,” he said. “I find black and white photography extremely satisfying. Color? Not so much.”
According to Peters, “That' is why I began painting. Almost immediately I became enamored of watercolors, especially the 'wet on wet' technique which produces both subtle shades of color, as well as great splashes of it,” which he says are part of “the constant surprises that flowing water presents.”
He says that there is a direct connection between his photography and painting in that his paintings “have the shapes of some of my black and white photographs, but abstracted and dramatized. Several have associations that I have attempted to pin down,” concluding, “The title of this show, 'Crossings,' gets close to a unifying principle.”