Santa Fe Artist Peter Krusco, Gallery 822 on Canyon Road

Although only in Santa Fe for the past seven years, Peter Krusko is already recognized as an award winning watercolor artist. His work has been in regional exhibitions and has won awards at the semi-annual shows of the New Mexico Watercolor Society, culminating in “Best of Show” in the fall of 2008. At the Society’s 2010 Fall Exhibit he received the Eleanor Bailey Memorial Award, and the Best of Show award in the Large Artwork Division at Masterworks of New Mexico the same year.

Krusko grew up in the Hudson Valley of New York State where the history of the area became part of his daily life. He recalls that his sixth grade classroom window looked across the Hudson River to the dramatic cliffs of the Palisades, a source of fantasy and day dreams. He could experience firsthand the locale of famous books like the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Krusko began drawing and painting as a young boy and became greatly influenced by the 19th century painters of the famous Hudson River School. The landscapes they had painted were the actual landscapes in which he grew up. He studied art at Pratt Institute in New York City where he received both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s Degree of Fine Art.

During his 33 year career as an art teacher in a public school in Westchester County, New York, Krusko exhibited in local and regional galleries. The early years he worked in several mediums, but by 1993 his view of the world and love of working outdoors led him to concentrate on, and strive to master, the watercolor medium. “I see the world as transparent and not opaque. Landscapes have an intriguing variety of energy, speed and movement, the destination of which can only be explained by the cleric, mystic, or scientist. The transparent layers of a watercolor perfectly express the language of landscape.”

At the same time Krusko began his annual summer visits to Santa Fe and the Southwest. He eventually chose Santa Fe as home base because he felt it important to continue living in a center of history and culture with strong community support of the arts. His work is now in private collections across the country

Artist Statement:
"Mine is a suggestive art. It resists definition or explanation. Its intent is to make people feel something more than they understand… Each composition quickly draws the viewer to the horizon. The fore-ground is meant as a springboard from which to move the eye over the transitional middle-ground to the distance, reducing the myriad details of nature to give the picture a quiet contemplative tone. In this way the landscape can be seen in its layered meditative whole."