Peterson featured during April’s First Friday Art Walk
PRESQUE ISLE — A First Friday Art Walk reception for Wintergreen Arts Center’s new exhibit by visual artist Andrea Peterson will be held on Friday, April 6, from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Barresi Financial Gallery at 149 State Street.
A native of Aroostook County, Andrea Peterson was trained as an artist at the University of Maine at Presque Isle. She completed her senior exhibition, “Excavations,” and graduated in 1999 with a bachelor of fine arts degree. For several years after her formal schooling, Peterson made her home along the coast in Rockland and Portland, where she continued to develop her taste for the abstract and women’s studies.
Peterson’s use of rich color in her acrylic paintings often make an unexpected connection between the spiritual and physical worlds. She explores shape, proximity and color in her design, and plays with both technical and emotional brush strokes in her abstract renditions. Her influences include Kahlo, O’Keefe and Wolf Kahn.
In 2009 she exhibited a body of works entitled “Femme Divine” at the University of Maine at Fort Kent. Some of her paintings are currently displayed at Farms Bakery and Studio 137 in Caribou and Aroostook Mental Health Center in Presque Isle.
She has returned to her hometown of New Sweden, where she lives with her daughters, Amalla and Maya. Peterson is presently working on paintings relating to the ponderings of the eternal questions, “Where did I come from?” and “Why am I here?” The exhibition of some of these works, “Roots,” will be at Wintergreen Arts Center in Presque Isle through the month of April.
Musical fare for the evening will be by Martha Meets Mambo! This Latin jazz trio consisting of three members of The Dangerous State Street Band, the house band at 149 State Street when it was the State Street Pub; Rod Thompson, Berklee School of Music ‘78, keyboardist; Kelly Green of Westfield, saxomophonist; and Martha Grant, percussionist.
They have been playing together since about 1995 in one form or another.
They play tasteful music for special occasions.
