Anne Peretz’ subject is landscape. She has painted mostly on Cape Cod where the images are sometimes rough and sometimes calm, seductively calm. She goes back from time to time to the same spots, to the same subtle crevice in the sand, to the same windswept tree on the dune, to the same pond either rippled or at utter calm, to the same path taking the viewer into infinity…or eternity. But on the canvas they appear as different spots, because either season or the varied elements have forced a different image on them. More often, however, the variety represents the painter’s sensibility which is constant and her mood which is certainly not.
Still, the discipline of Peretz’s brush is what her eyes see… filtered through what she imagines beyond. She sees both the perfect calm of idyllic nature and treacherous storms. Her paintings, nuanced in stroke, in color and in depth, are at once almost luminist, as in Inness, and flat in the complicated way of Rothko.
Peretz paints large canvases of Cape dunes as well as intimate works begun at least en pleine aire. But the Cape does not exhaust either her painterly vocabulary or imagery. She has evoked the grandeur of New Zealand, the intimacy and awe of Israel in rocks and sparse hillsides around Jerusalem, the wildness of the Spanish coast, the stubborn historicity of cities and villages emerging from the Moroccan desert, and what are surely the near-last impressions of pilings at our sea ports, fading away in places like New York and Provincetown before our very eyes.
It is not surprising that Anne Peretz’ paintings are hanging in many distinguished and distinctive private collections. And, of course, they are in public collections, among them: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Bard College Museum; The Jewish Museum; The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University; The Israel Museum, The Provincetown Art Association.
