The brushless painter

Jon Petro asks, what is an artist without a brush?

by Leon Nigrosh

JON PETRO: FACES AND STORIES At the ARTSWorcester Gallery at Quinsigamond Community College, 670 WestBoylston Street, Worcester, through March 18.

When Jon Petro finished a day of classes at the Worcester Art Museum he would rush across town to work

on the loading dock of his family's produce company, Acme Pre-Pak. A little more than a decade later, he is one of the owners of company, and, not coincidentally, his painting has kept pace and advanced as well. Twenty-eight of his large, portrait paintings are currently on the hallway walls of the administration building at Quinsigamond Community College. The intensity of each lavishly painted image is further heightened because of the space's narrowness. Since it is impossible to back away from the works, we must confront them individually, coming to admire not only the strength of Petro's technique but the power of his imagery.

Petro is concerned with the connection between his sitters and the viewers. For this reason, he concentrates on facial features, eyes, and -- when showing more than just the torso -- body positions, most often leaving the background as a solid color. He also uses himself as his subject in the majority of his portraits, not because of any narcissistic reasons (although there is one canvas so titled) but because he knows his own emotions best. This approach can be seen best in the show's signature work, jon. Here the artist looks out from under a simple straw hat, straight at the viewer as if waiting for a response. The wide brushstrokes across the T-shirt and throughout the soft gray background flatten the planes and cause us to concentrate on the energy emanating from the artist's articulated eyes. In a rare departure from the plain background, Petro has two people in the white party posed in front of a fiery-red wall broken up by a green picture frame and a brace of yellow candles.

As we examine each canvas it soon becomes apparent that there is a undercurrent of art history effectively at work here. In one work with an obvious historical reference, gauguin, I'm not, Petro shows himself dressed in the style of that well-known Post-Impressionist artist and slouched in front of a Tahitian beauty similar to those who graced many of Gauguin's (1848-1903) luminous paintings. Less obvious, but equally redolent in historical reference and metaphor is Petro's the brushless painter. In this large, dark canvas, we see one of Petro's former WAM classmates rendered in the style of El Greco's (1541-1614) Frey Felix Hortensio Parevicino, dressed in a large, white ruffed collar and brilliant blue frock coat, holding a painter's palette, and standing against a stark black background.

The concept of the brushless painter shows up again in two self-portraits in which the artist's hand is encased in a bandage. One of these pictures, le negro -- a reference to the Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell (1915-91) -- we see a forlorn Petro looking somewhat like one of Picasso's (1881-1973) early self-portraits (coincidentally holding a palette but no brush). Petro explained that these works were painted during darker moments when he lacked inspiration, this was his way of asking and answering the question, "What is an artist without a brush?"

Another vibrantly colored-oil- on-jute image concentrates on a figure with a missing hand. phifer this was inspired by Edouard Manet's 1866 painting, The Fifer, which shows a young man dressed in appropriate French army colors framed, much like Petro's subjects, in a flat patch of color. Petro's work takes virtually the opposite position from Manet's glorification of soldiery, by making the boy's missing limb serve as an anti-war statement.

As the exhibition title states, this show is filled with fascinating faces, each with an engaging story to tell. And because Petro expansively delineates his subjects with radiant and luscious paint, we are drawn ever deeper toward these almost-too-real characters.

The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Call 854-4309.