Sunday Spill: Peter Steiner Exhibit, “All Over The Place”

Peter Steiner Exhibit: “All Over The Place” 

I took a drive across the state line yesterday afternoon to see Peter Steiner’s new exhibit, “All Over the Place.”

Peter, besides being a New Yorker cartoonist (he’s the artist behind one of the, if not the most reproduced cartoons in New Yorker history), is also a novelist and painter.

This exhibit features a good number of Peter’s paintings. I mentioned one to him that particularly caught my eye. It’s of a dark ship, with billowing smokestacks. In the foreground, frogmen, their goggles glowing, pop their heads above the water’s surface. I liked the idea of “frogmen” — the image of them, as well as the use of the word (it’s used in the title).

Peter told me he had painted the ship first and then let the canvas be for quite sometime. And then one day — years later, I believe — he went back to the painting and began painting the shapes in the water — the shapes that turned into frogmen. In a way, this is similar to how cartoons sometimes come about. They simmer, unfinished. And then, suddenly, the missing piece shows up.

Below: a wall of Peter Steiner’s paintings on exhibit. The frogmen painting is on the top left

Visit Peter Steiner’s website here.