Continuing through December 20, 2025
Pegan Brooke paints scenic — one might say dangerously scenic — locations where the land meets the water: Bolinas Lagoon in Marin County, just north of San Francisco; the inland Seto Sea on Japan’s main island; Silver Creek in Idaho; and the Aven River at Pont-Aven, Brittany, in northwestern France, a favored location for nineteenth-century landscape painters, most notably Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard. The School of Pont-Aven’s Synthetism was adopted from Impressionism’s pure visual observation and loose brushwork to pursue subjective, psychological ends. That is exactly what Brooke does, although her work derives from additional sources, including the Divisionism, or pointillism, of Georges Seurat, and the tremulous, exploratory brushwork of Alberto Giacometti’s existentialist portraits of figures obscured by and emerging from space.
The ten oil paintings on canvas comprising “Into Absence: MIST,” all made during the past two years in the artist’s Sun Valley studio, focus on nearshore zones, obscured by mist and bordering on illegible. But only at first glance. In this series, which the artist began in 2012, Brooke is drawn to mist as a liminal or transitional state between clear weather and rain. Metaphorically, it’s a poetic suspension, filled with possibilities and a reasonable analogue for the artist’s immersion in the creative process. She places it outside of time, yet ultimately encapsulates it.
The works, all untitled except for numerical designation (e.g. “S- 372” or S- 385”) may seem at first deliberately indecipherable and recessive. At least they are beautifully suggestive of embroidered silk fabric and monochromatic traditional Chinese ink painting, or, to my eye, Philip Guston’s Abstract Impressionist work of the 1950s.
However, the more you ponder their richly wrought textures, tissues of myriad touches of paint in subdued grays, tans and blues, applied in successive layers, one color at a time, the more you accept the descriptive illusion underlying the abstraction while accepting the painterly artifice of color and shape in relation to other colors and shapes. Some of the paintings even suggest the idealized landscapes of the Old Masters, seen through a scrim of light and haze, or of time itself. Brooke’s light-filled paintings may initially appear abstract. They become more realistic the more we study them. Then they become abstractions again, with paint taking on the double duties of representation and autonomous expression.
It is risky to project current anxieties onto art that seem amenable to such interpretations. Brooke’s identification of ever-changing shorelines, proverbially unstable, for all their beauty, with the liminal state between land and sea, solid and liquid, light and heavy, wet and dry, and so on, makes it difficult not to read a fraught, transient beauty into these subtle paintings. This would reflect an endorsement of landscapes that both take us out of ourselves and to the brutish reality of the current threat. “So be it” is the moral starting point of this body of work.
