Drake’s figures glide, skate, climb or rest in dark, watery landscapes and cavernous, classical structures. They appear shrouded by veils of mist or steam that invoke the darkness and haziness of the dream world. In his paintings, Drake achieves his characteristic effects of light and atmosphere by first building up layer upon layer of varnish, acrylic and oil paints and then working back into them with sandpaper. As he removes bits of each layer, revealing lighter or different colors underneath, he creates images that appear to glow richly from within. Employing this reductive technique, Drake has since 1993 been able to produce with Magnolia a series of lithographs that retain all of the mystery and luminosity of his works on canvas.
Peter Drake lives and works in New York. He shows regularly throughout the United States; his work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Achenbach Collection, San Francisco, CA; and the Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, Polanco, Mexico. In 1987, he was the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Stilt Walker was pulled at Magnolia Editions in Oakland, CA on a flatbed transfer press. The image was created by the artist by sanding away the highlights from a sheet of mylar painted black. The drawings were transferred to plates via contact printing. The prints were pulled individually, one color run at a time. After a proofing session, where various color changes were tried, the artist selected a right to print which was used as the standard for the edition. After signing, the prints were varnished with an UltraViolet filtering polymer to enhance the richness of the color.
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