Peter Burega: My Song of the Sea

Peter Burega: My Song of the Sea

The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

— WALLACE STEVENS, The Necessary Angel

As an accomplished abstract painter, Peter Burega is a master of absorbing impressions of the beauty present in this world — glistening diamonds on ocean waves, the blue of infinite sky, a sunset’s crimson blaze, a mountain range’s jagged punctuation of a distant horizon. Devoid of exact represented object and using only the interplay of color and texture, he coaxes and distills onto his oil paintings on canvas the essences of his experience of this beauty that exist at the junction of memory and imagination to conjure his own magnificent “world within”.

Perhaps among the most visually rewarding yet of this accomplished artist’s distinguished oeuvre that has unfolded over a successful career of more than twenty-five years, the new paintings in this latest LewAllen exhibition of Burega’s work, entitled “My Song of the Sea,” emanate those vivid essences of breathtaking landscapes and seascapes observed by Burega. They possess profoundly engaging and immersive qualities that transform them into deeply satisfying meditations on nature.

Like a maestro’s libretto from a lifetime of taking in vibrations in the air, they are careful compositions, except in his case, this maestro’s work is based on sights, and sensations of the ineffable beauty that surrounds him in the world, of looking closely and caring deeply. That is how Burega composes his inner “song of the sea” and many other songs of the world’s great beauty. And like those of

the great poets through all of history, his painted “songs” share the grace of an inner world of beauty that connects with his viewers to touch something deep within them and provide a bit of deliverance from the gloom and desolation that may, from time to time, be the misfortune of the moment.

From allowing himself to plunge visually and psychically into experiencing images of cloud-cloaked mountain ridges, blazing orange sunsets, and azure sea vistas, Burega emerges imbued with their essences and is remarkably able to infuse his impressions into paintings on canvas. Especially in this new group of work, Burega’s unique combination of intellect and intuition—elemental to his process—is evident in the way he confers a highly personal vision of nature as a vibrantly intangible place of light and color on canvas. Also in certain of the paintings included in this new body of work, Burega divides his picture plane into two discernible parts, allowing him to present a second iteration of the same experience on which the painting is based. One part may contain more information inherent to that experience and the other part may simplify or reduce that information and present it in an alternative way.

Using a rich treasury of impressions from the earth’s greatest beauty, he masterfully applies layers of oil pigments, brushing and suffusing, scrapping and removing, producing dynamic rhythms of space and depth. The resulting atmospheric duality of his surfaces, between vaporous ethereality and affirmative physicality, serves to dematerialize the precipitating observations, blessedly interrupt time for the viewer, and gently express the essences of the beautiful that the artist has experienced in observing landscapes, being by the sea, and looking at the sky. The result is a true vivacity of vision and an opportunity for a shared experience of an inner world. continued on pg 6

In the Reeds, 2025, oil on canvas, 40" x 40"

Peter Burega: My Song of the Sea

Burega’s mode of experiencing these creative essences is not superficial but, rather, it is deeply spiritual and redolent with profound inner meaning that drives his expression on canvas. It results in work that elevates and inspires in its intelligence and gently sooths with its emotion. The viewer too experiences from his paintings a sense of transcendence to a nebula of pure feeling that enchants, beckons personal recollection, and imparts a deep sense of enduring joy.

While his contemplative paintings may take visual cues from landscapes and seascapes, Burega keeps any definitive allusions oblique and open-ended, dissolving specificity into an overall apotheosis of feeling. He distills the atmospherics of place into a weightless dance of elements: light, color, shadow, and temperature. The fluidity of this dance renders it a waltz with the soul. Often the color range within a single work is restrained, a tantalizing flirtation with lusciousness not fully indulged. In this exercise of aesthetic self-restraint, there is a sophisticated sense of elegance and grace that allows the work to border on feelings of the sublime.

Though Burega’s paintings may contain hints of land, bodies of water, horizon lines, or sunlight cast from above, the artist enlists dynamic surface texture, softly glowing harmonies of color, and radiant light to suggest different tonalities of emotion. Layering together warm wisps of ochre, coolly refreshing blues, and other more subdued passages of color or shadow, Burega’s art emanates the sensation of emotionally charged air, feather-light and expressive.

The immateriality of Burega’s art is countered only by the feeling of solidity provided by his painting process, which is highly textural. He builds his surfaces through layers of brushed and scraped paint, utilizing sgraffito and other subtractive processes to convey space and depth. His surfaces rush at the senses; conveying the feeling of ocean spray, or perhaps the peripheral sound of wind in the trees or off the mountains.

It is thus that Burega’s paintings extrude from the literal world the serene and harmonious qualities of nature’s beauty and present as soul-comforting refuge on canvas for the inner worlds of those discerning enough to connect with the resonances he has so ably put there. May these works gratify the heart and renew the weary spirit, for they truly have the capacity to offer joy.

— KENNETH R. MARVEL

Then Came the Fog and the Mist, 2025, oil on canvas, 60" x 48"

The Rain Travelled Upon the Sea (diptych), 2025, oil on canvas, 40"