In a World of His Own: The Prints of Peter Milton

There are not many printmakers in the United States who make it on their own - that is, who earn their livelihood solely by making prints... At age thirty-nine Peter Milton made the decision to devote his entire energies to printmaking. Today he is considered the most successful of contemporary artists.

Kneeland McNulty

Peter Winslow Milton. American, b. 1930-
Milton's mesmerizing world of invented reality and mind-bending perspectives present a richly detailed view of society that is at once contemporary as much as it is a world of the past. Leisurely times spent playing pool in the parlour, and sitting in the sun room of some palatial salon sipping tea while watching fish swim above one's heads as though we are in an aquarium are only some of Milton's twisted images of reality.

The period Milton references harkens back to the Victorian and Industrial Age. We see old automobiles, and large, airy interiors of grand homes, with children playing in enormous expanses alongside of a painter at his easel; with his faithful dog curled up at his feet. The complexity of Milton's fantastical images, combines several types of spaces, interiors and overlapping spaces into one gigantic place of one's dreams. The artistic references present in Milton's work also intrigue us and make us feel as though we are a part of Milton's dreamscapes.

Stages for the ballet behind private viewing boxes for the opera, intermittent with genteel folk and the commoner are make us feel as though we seeing a performance onstage and off. The gathering of people for the ballet have a similar feel as the lively patrons of a Toulouse Lautrec cabaret.

Milton’s imagery frequently draws on elements from the late 19th and early 20th century English and French literary world. He manages not only capture the mood of another era but also mid-century cinema. Bergman and Fellini are among his major artistic influences.

The artist's compositional similarities to a Caillebotte painting, or one of Milton's interior/exteriors remind one of the perception-twisted environs of an M.C. Escher print, or the flip of being within and outside a structure like we see in his lonely staircases with gaslight parks and the glassed-in dome of a train station or a conservatory. These are complex pictures and we revel in the artist's pain-staking details.

Milton has received numerous awards for his work, and has a published book titled Peter Milton: Complete Prints 1960-1996. This is a person worthy of the print medium and pushes it with every technical and cultural/artistic influence he can muster. Let us salute one of our modern masters and pray let us look forward to more from his unique world.....

Education
1954 B.F.A. Yale University, New Haven, CT
1961 M.F.A Yale University, New Haven, CT
Work In Public Collections
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY
Ashville Museum of Art, NC
Baltimore Museum of ART, MD
Banco de la Republica, Bogotá, Columbia
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France
Boston Public Library, MA
British Museum, London, England
Brooklyn Museum, NY
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA
Cincinnati Art Museum, OH
Cleveland Museum of Art, OH
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Detroit Institute of Arts, MI
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, CA
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
George Washington University, Washington, DC
Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester
Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá, Columbia
Museo de Arte Moderno "La Tertulla", Cali, Columbia
Museum of American Art, Washington DC
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
New Britain Museum of American Art, CT
New Jersey State Museum, Trenton
New York Times
Newark Public Library, NJ
Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA
Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
Portland Art Museum, OR
Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, RI
Rutgers University, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick
Seattle Art Museum, WA
Society of American Graphic Artists, Inc., NYC
Stanford University, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, MN
Tate Gallery, London, England
Yale University, New Haven, CT

The Surreal Netherworld of Victor Manuel Hernandez Castillo

Mexico's love affair with printmaking goes way back to the time of the Spanish Colonial invasion. Prints produced at that time were mostly brought to the New Spain, via the Church, describing pictures of saints, stories from the Bible. Some printed images came by way of maps, describing the newly appropriated Viceregal territories; or for the curious and scientific-minded, anthropological prints identifying the physical attributes of the New World's 'human species' had a huge European audience for those people looking to find a new life in the Meso-American'colonies'.

The printing process was introduced to the indigenous working class, and it, like architecture and decorative arts of the period, began to thrive. Prints to illustrate books and the movable printing letters produced an army of small papers and presses. Print shops that produced lithographs and relief prints grew as the country's war for independence came about. Those printmakers commented upon the state of affairs and societal customs and superstitions. Approaching the 20th century, printmaking in Mexico took a decided political turn, and printmakers like Jose Guadalupe Posada helped to fuel movements for the rights of the working classes and promote political agendas.

I have been fascinated with the brutal honesty one can find in Mexican or Latin American prints. Many artists have made images, knowing full well it would cause upheaval, and sometimes at great personal sacrifice. The flip side of Mexican printmaking is that which relates to literature and the surrealism one finds rampantly running the streets of this huge, wonderfully chaotic and exotic country. Complex images filled with what one can physically see, are sprinkled with one cannot possibly understand, yet magically it seems perfectly normal. Anyone who has read the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Luis Alberto Urrea understands this concept well.

One contemporary Mexican printmaker whose works describe the more surreal side of life is Victor Manuel Hernandez Castillo. Castillo's work is initially something out of a acid-trip dream. There are monsters and ghoulish faces, strange planes with human heads and arms attached to spoked-wheels. People, using the term liberally, fly through his compositions as though in a Chagall-inspired dream, but they seem more appropriately linked to the current culture's vampire-laced fantasies of creatures out for an evening's feast. In any event, Castillo fills his compositions with loads of fun and creep. Castillo gives us ghoulish kids riding their bicycles like banshees to a place no one wants to ponder, horrific gargoyle-like creatures out of the movie "Ghost-busters" travel moonlit landscapes in search of their prey,and depraved bird-bats fly overhead in search of new victims.

The netherworld Castillo presents to us is attractively repulsive. As much as we look, there is more to see buried within other images. His compositions are chock-full of creatures where we spend maybe more time than we want trying to figure out what they are. And for what it's worth, its all completely in bounds as far as Mexican surrealism goes. These netherworld creatures could stand for persons in our visible world, or stand as symbols for the corruption-laden operators who have plagued Mexico for years. I can't speak for Castillo's intentions. I can only describe what the images portend. Even a seemingly simple family portrait image with ancestors framed on a wall behind the primordial family unit has undertones of those whose family members weren't maybe so pleasant.

This work has teeth, and it bites into what rests slightly below the skin of this country, describes an undertone of fear and unrest among Mexico's sleeping giant population. If his images were truly to come to the surface, to the conscience of the people, some would go mad, some would cry out in pain, and some would go back to sleep because it would be preferable to think it was all a bad dream than see it as reality. Castillo places these images in our faces, and puts a slightly quirky and unreal twist on them to make us think they are surreal or humorous, when in fact they tell the truth. Looking at them we can see the clever disguises he puts in the images, but they get under our skin and fester like boils. Rising to the surface, these boils will burst and bring out the ugliness that one's conscious mind would choose to bury. These images cannot be ignored, nor can they be forgotten.

Education: Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico