August Robin Peters – 2025 – Mixed media – 34 x 29 x 2,5 cm.
Collage made of bits and pieces of older work combined with new parts, some used materials are: Vinyl from my earlier atelier floor, tear-out parts of a painting on paper, cut-out piece of a painted canvas, pink wooden part from a children’s toy, found on the street.
This abstract artwork almost made itself, the only thing I did was to organize the order. Just like a piece of mosaic. Putting left-over cut-out cardboard strips. Which came from cutting off strips from another older painting on cardboard. By puzzling the pieces afther each other, I could play with the rhythm of the colors and forms/stains and at the same time take control. The image created is still abstract, but to me, it tends to give a little bit of a botanical feel to it, without actually being a figurative image of such.
It’s 09.34 in the morning on september 14th 2019 and I am looking out of the window of the apartment where I’m staying for a holiday in Venice. In front of me is this colorful patio in the neighbourhood of Dorsoduro.
I always wanted to do something with this picture, I love the big tree in the middle and the warm colors of the old houses with lots of windows and blinds. The purple cloth hanging to dry in the sun as a centre of the composition. The picture had something reassuring and soothing to me, as if it says: It’s ‘going to be a good day and everything is going to be allright. I took the idea to produce a puzzle out of this photo just for fun, to keep me occupied in pandemic times in 2020. After I actually had put together the puzzle, I began to think how I could make an artwork out of this image, using the puzzle pieces.
This is how it became a triptych because I started to separate certain parts en made three individual works out of it. It took me quite a while to get it right, because every work had to have the right amount of puzzle parts and the proportions had to be equally divided, so that each work was interesting enough to look at. I started somewhere in 2021 with three wooden panels but left them for years laying in my atelier and always wanted to finish them. I started to work on them again in september 2024 and here is the result. I worked in my usual way of combining painting with collage, using parts of paper, cardboard and other materials.
Link to the art auction on the website of PK50 : https://50pk.nl/veiling/
Link to website Galerie2020 : https://www.galerie2020.nl/
Impressie van de etalage tijdens de maand november bij de winkel van ‘Studio Boter’ aan de Oude Boteringestraat 5 in Groningen.
‘Headquarters, Collage made of cardboard, newspaper, gobelin, kitchen towel, mdf wood, canvas & paint. 30cm x 30cm, processed between August 2023 and February 2024 August Robin Peters.
Painting – ‘Expedition rhythm’ – Acryl on canvas – 40 x 50 cm – August Robin Peters – 2024
Both collages works are made of left over cardboard. Pieces of cardboard lying around on the atelier floor when I’m working, I use these to stroke away paint with my brush to clean them. So most of the stains are coincidence, and some are not. Making a composition with these elements makes me take some control of the image. In these two works I combined them with not so coincidental stains and even copied pieces of dessins from fabrics and added them in the image, which give them the needed contrast and depth.
I called them ‘Artist Talk’ because of the different parts that make one image; different points of view but in dialogue with each other.
Preparing a day at the park…
These are studies for making a big size work that I wanted to realize for my participation at the colorfield performance in the summer of ’23. My goal was to make a colorful minimal work with abstract organic shapes and round forms. This idea of these round dots came from my sketches in which I just started to draw stains with colour until it became a form which satisfied me as such. There is still a lot more of experimenting to do with that. For the painting which I had to realize in one day at the project, it had to be recognizable as a landscape but somewhat in between abstract and figurative. How far can you go with abstraction en what do you accept as a recognizable form?
august robin peters 