Peter Nadin

Peter Nadin has not shown work since 1992, when he stopped showing in an attempt to “unlearn how to make art.” The past decade and a half has been marked by an intensively private artistic outpouring on the farm he owns with his wife in the Catskill Mountains. Old Field Farm accommodates 150 acres of forest, wild bee pasture, habitat for goats, chickens, hogs, and vegetable and fruit gardens. Nadin’s paintings and sculptures involve a process closely linked to the farm, its animals, its vegetation, and its environs. The tactile, olfactory, visual, and auditory experiences of the land move him to create marks on linen using materials from the farm: honey, wax, bee propolis, black walnut, elderberry, chicken eggs, and cashmere wool. His First Mark series is therefore analogous to medieval relics. The reliquary held a fragment of the saintly corpus, whereas the painting or icon was mimetic. Nadin’s paintings and sculptures of the last fifteen years represent an artistic process that returns art to the most basic impulse from which it first emerged.