It has been a busy summer for Peter Dayton. “Dark Garden,” his site-specific installation created for the stairwell from Guild Hall’s lobby to the balcony of its theater, opened a three-and-a-half-year run on July 1.
His booth at the recent Spring/Break NYC art fair, which was curated by Julia Willett and Bronte Zunis, was one of 15 booths (out of 102) singled out for praise by Sarah Cascone, senior writer for Artnet News.
Gary Mamay Photo
“Dark Garden” covers the walls of the staircase with images of begonias. Working from computer files, Duggal Visual Solutions printed the same flower in black and white, over and over, on low-luster premium vinyl, rolls of which were applied to the walls. Mr. Dayton cut out color versions of the flower and applied them over the black-and-white underlay, creating an illusion of depth, “making it jump,” as he said.
While he originally considered titling the piece “Fleurs du Mal,” after Baudelaire, he settled on “Dark Garden” “because it’s got this kind of eerie edge that I thought lends itself to a kind of theatricality,” he said, pointing to the door leading into the theater.
Melanie Crader, Guild Hall’s director of visual arts, sought Mr. Dayton out for the stairway installation after seeing a pattern of the same begonia on a table of his at Harper’s Gallery in East Hampton.
Flowers have been a motif central to Mr. Dayton’s art since he returned to his mother’s house in East Hampton in 1988 after three years in France.
“I found old House and Garden magazines in a dumpster behind the house on Main Street and I started looking through them. They were from the late ‘50s or early ‘60s and the photography was really bad. I thought, what if I took these and made flower collages out of them?”
He showed the collages to a few people, but it wasn’t until the early 1990s when, at the urging of a friend, he took them to some galleries in Manhattan and wound up with a show at the Paul Morris Gallery, one of the first in Chelsea. The show sold out, and he hasn’t looked back.
While Mr. Dayton has enjoyed a successful career as an artist, including site-specific flower installations at Chanel and Louis Vuitton stores all over the world, he enjoyed a second accomplished career, as a musician.
That calling had its roots in a visit to the Paramount Theater with his family when he was 9 years old. It was 1964, and they saw the Shangri-Las, the Tokens, and . . . drum roll . . . the Beatles. “We had to stand on our seats and all I saw was Ringo’s head,” he recalled, “and this amazing racket and screaming girls.”
Five years later, while listening to WNEW-FM, a progressive rock station, he heard about “this Aquarian art festival that might be happening upstate.” He put $36 cash in an envelope, sent it to the station, and received two tickets to Woodstock in return.
With two other friends and an art teacher from his school as a chaperone, the 14-year-old headed with almost half a million other music fans to Max Yasgur’s farm.
“The best thing I saw was watching Jimi Hendrix at 11 a.m. Monday morning. I was 100 yards away from him. But it was sad because it was so late that much of the crowd had left long before he went on. My lifelong fixation with music came from that.”
After a year abroad in France and a year at Franklin College in Lugano, Switzerland, he returned to the United States and applied to art schools. He enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as a painting major, “doing landscape painting, kind of a Fairfield Porter thing.” He was living in a rooming house with two other students.
During that first year, he went to New York City to see a rock concert in Central Park. The show was canceled, but while he and his brother were walking in the park, “there was this Xerox stapled to a tree, and it said ‘Ramones, CBGBs.’ My brother said, that’s probably where it’s happening.”
Not long after, he went to the iconic Bowery venue with his boombox. “The Ramones did 20 minutes. It was unbelievable. I taped it and I was like, I’ve got to do this.” Back at the rooming house, he played the tape for his roommates and said they should start a band.
“They said they didn’t play instruments. I said that doesn’t matter now. You’re going to play drums, you’re going to play bass, and I’ll learn guitar and sing, and I’m sure we can write songs. We started playing and we were godawful. We didn’t know how to play anything.”
They began to rehearse seriously in 1977, and as La Peste, an early Boston punk band, won that city’s Rock and Roll Rumble in 1978. Before breaking up, La Peste opened for the Ramones and the English punk band the Damned, and played CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, and other clubs in New York and Boston.
Mr. Dayton left the band to start the Peter Dayton Band, which enjoyed a lucrative five-year stretch playing colleges. However, in 1985, exhausted, he decided to go to Paris for six months to figure out what, besides music, to do next. But within three months he had recorded a record there, and, because he spoke French, found himself on television, doing interviews, and touring.
While there, he began to make art again, and when he returned to East Hampton in 1988, he moved into his mother’s house and enrolled in the Master Workshop of Fine Arts at Southampton College, which was run by April Gornik, Eric Fischl, Ann Chwatsky, and Jack Youngerman. He also discovered those House and Garden magazines, and started showing his work.
He tends to work in series, and one recurring motif is the surfboard. That series launched in 2006 with “Surfboards by Clement Greenberg,” a titular nod to the influential art critic who espoused that the flatness of the picture plane was paramount to painting.
While the surfboard works, made of oil, acrylic, paper, and resin on eight-foot-tall panels, are flat-out gorgeous, with titles referring to specific hard-edge painters such as Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, and Barnett Newman, they acquire an art-historical dimension.
Other series, among them the glitter paintings, the rocket sculptures, and the recent “Lava Lamp Blues,” support his statement that “there is a positivity to my work that I can’t help.” In an interview with Maryam Eisler for Lux magazine, he elaborated:
“To me, beauty is the law. I do it intrinsically. . . . It just isn’t on the surface. It’s deep. Peter Marino saw immediately that I had a gift for this ‘beauty thing’ and he just took me under his wing. That’s how and why my association with Chanel has been so great.” The renowned architect recently acquired one of the surfboards for the Chanel store in St. Tropez, France.
While the glitter paintings, made with glitter and spray varnish on canvas, are arresting in reproduction or on a monitor, in person the surface shimmers as the viewer moves past them. A short video on his website captures this phenomenon.
The Lava Lamp works are similar insofar as they are gorgeous in reproduction, but they gain a powerful dimension when seen in person because of the high sheen of their surfaces. Those paintings begin with Mr. Dayton pouring yellow and red onto the flat surface. He then wipes the paint so it thins out and continues through several stages of adding paint and pushing it around.
“The funny part about these is that when I’m making them, they take about 30 minutes, maybe less,” he told a visitor, “but I don’t see what you see now when I stop and cover them and put them in a tent. The next day, because the stuff moves around all night, leveling, you get all this stuff going on. It paints itself, really.”
In what promises to be an interesting and wide-ranging conversation, Mr. Dayton will be at Guild Hall on Nov. 3 to talk about “Dark Garden” with Ms. Crader.
