Incollect Magazine - Issue 8

74 www.incollect.com attitude about life. It taught me if you have a good attitude, life is going to treat you well.” Sculthorpe approaches his landscape subjects with a mentality that can only be described as love. He is an artist with obvious and honed technical skills coupled with a subtle, preternatural sensitivity to the natural world. He is a master of light and shadows, energizing his simplified, solitary rural scenes with watery reflections and searching, atmospheric skies that are dramatic and romantic but never nostalgic — they are too real for that. He paints what he sees, filtered through memory with the aid of a sketch or photographs and with attention to the minutest elements. His paintings somehow make you feel like you are there, with him, facing the actual landscape. Sculthorpe paints nearly every day in his studio in Rockland, Delaware, on the border of Pennsylvania and a stone’s throw from Chadd’s Ford. “I might do half an hour or six hours of work, it varies from day to day depending on how interested I am in the painting,” he says. He used to work on multiple paintings at the same time, but today he finds himself concentrating on one painting at the one time. “The paintings recently have been excruciatingly complicated and so they take me longer to paint. I am demanding more from myself. I’ve had so many one-man shows and stopped doing that, so I am not under the gun to produce. I am, more, these days, painting for myself.” Sculthorpe says that, as he is getting older, he finds the best time to paint is around dinner time. “It sounds weird but that is the best time, I just get embedded in the work.” He also has a fondness for the soft, diffused glow of moonlight and will head out of doors to sketch a scene. “I have experimented with the moonlight atmosphere and there is something different and special. Blue sky or gray sky, you can’t do so much. The luminescence of moonlight is weaker and not as defined and so edges and shadows of things are fuzzy and so the landscape has a different feel to it, a different mood.” Peter Sculthorpe, Bicycle and Barn. Watercolor, 14 x 20 inches. Left: Peter Sculthorpe, Shetland Day. Oil on panel, 8 x 8 inches. Right: Peter Sculthorpe, Jack. Oil on linen, 8 x 8 inches.