Apartment No. 6 in downtown Vero’s Pocahontas Building is a quiet place. If anything, the soft whoosh of cars passing below on 14th Avenue below is relaxing. The place is filled with light, even on an overcast day. An easel bearing a luminous landscape-in-progress dominates the living room. Other paintings hang on the walls throughout the one-bedroom apartment; the smallest works lie face up on chairs and the bed.
“I don’t really live here as much as before, but it’s nice to have this,” says painter Peter Laughton, who of late has been spending a lot of his time at a friend’s house, beachside. Nevertheless, he is not ready to give up his mainland sanctuary.
“Here it’s quiet and I’m doing what I love to do,” he says.
On the other hand, he adds with a nod to his workspace, “it’s good to walk away from this sometimes.”
He is reminded of those times in the middle of the night when he would get up and start changing paintings. “Which is not a good idea. It’s better to put it away for a little bit and then come back to it.”
As much as he enjoys the privacy of his work space, Laughton is preparing to open his studio next Wednesday evening to anyone who wants to see his paintings, variations on the eternal theme of sand, sea and sky.
Gesturing toward an expansive landscape he calls “Seeking Solitude,” Laughton differentiates solitude from loneliness; the emotional response he wants to elicit from his audience is not desolation, but exultation. That he elicits from another aspect in many of his paintings, the horizon.
“It’s infinite, he says. “I’m just drawn to that.”
Laughton has been painting the interconnection of earth, air and water within the confines of the Pocahontas for about two years now. Four years ago he sailed his boat down to Florida from Massachusetts to visit friends in Fort Pierce, and got, as he says, “stuck” here.
“I could have moved back,” Laughton says, adding that for a long time he “really resisted being here.”
That’s because he loves New England: the White Mountains, where he did a lot of hiking, and the Maine coast, which he sailed along twice. During the three decades that he was self-employed as a trade show exhibit designer in Boston, he and his family spent almost every summer in Maine.
While he still takes summer trips to New England, Laughton says he stays in Florida because he “got involved in this art stuff.”
When he was living aboard his sailboat in Stuart, he began to paint small watercolors, a pastime that has engaged him periodically throughout his adult life.
He had brought the set along with him in the anticipation that he would sail on to the Bahamas, where he would earn some cash painting portraits of people’s boats.
“I didn’t get to the Bahamas,” he admits. “But I did these tiny little paintings.”
Featuring broad vistas of sea and sky, the watercolors were executed in a technique that Laughton developed in 1978 and still uses today. Using rubbing alcohol as a medium, Laughton paints onto paper that he has coated with a layer of gesso (acrylic-based white primer). The alcohol-thinned pigments spread over the impermeable surface in filmy layers. Because the paint cannot sink into the paper, Laughton can move the colors around until he has exactly the effect that he wants. None of his paint strokes are final until he says they are.
After he had done “a bunch” of the little paintings, he decided to go ashore and shop them around in Stuart’s art galleries. As he recalls it, the director of one gallery, Susan Steinhausen, looked at half a dozen paintings before asking, “Do you want a show?”
It was September 2011, and Steinhausen wanted a dozen 14 x 16 inch watercolors ready in about six weeks’ time for a November exhibition.
Laughton recalls that he “took a deep breath and said, ‘Of course.’”
He sold “a few” from that show, and in the following year ventured into Vero Beach to try his luck here.
Darby Fine Art proved to be the right fit for his art, and Laughton was encouraged to begin painting in oil for that gallery. Soon he had moved up in scale to 30 x 40 inch canvases, a size in which he still enjoys working, although he also creates “minis,” oils on panels and canvas boards that are no bigger than the watercolors that he first showed in Stuart.
Since the closing of Darby last spring, Laughton has found outlets for his paintings at Bennett Gallery in Nashville, TN, and at Artblend, a gallery in Fort Lauderdale. The latter recently featured three of Laughton’s paintings in its booth at Spectrum Miami, an art show that ran concurrently with Basel Miami.
In Vero Beach, Meghan Candler carries a few of Laughton’s “minis” in her Village Shops gallery.
All that is not bad for a painter who says he has become a serious artist only within the past two years and who, so far, has had enviable success selling his paintings. The question is, does he paint to the market?
“That’s always a challenge. I have discussions with businesspeople who have said, ‘You’ve got to paint to sell.’ I say, ‘Well, I have to paint for myself, but I also want to sell.’ Because I’m not doing it just for my own indulgence,” he says.
A big influence on his work as well as his sales philosophy has been Provincetown, MA, landscape painter Anne Packard.
“She’s 82 years old now, and painting for 50 years. And is now extremely successful,” says Laughton, who says that Packard’s canvases of sand, sea and sky sell for upwards of $10,000.
He became aware of her work about a decade ago and was “captivated.” On a visit to Cape Cod a couple years ago he screwed up enough courage to phone her. The two met at Packard’s studio, and hit it off to the extent that the older artist invited Laughton to send her pictures of his work for critique.
“She’s become a good friend. For her to take the time and interest in my work has been a huge influence,” he says.
“She taught me to create paintings that are non-specific. Everything I do is from imagination. I don’t use any reference material.”
Packard’s imagination is fed by the view from her waterfront studio in Provincetown. Has Laughton been similarly inspired by Florida’s mist-hung vistas?
“I’ll never paint a palm tree. I just won’t,” he says; he doesn’t want to define his paintings by location. Nevertheless, he notes, viewers often want to place them in the well-loved localities of their own imaginations.
With that, the visitor’s eyes stray to the painting on Laughton’s easel, where a mass of rosy clouds rises above a limitless ocean.
“That’s not finished yet,” he cautions. “I won’t put my name on it until I finish it, and then I won’t touch it again.”
Laughton’s open house is from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 17. The Pocahontas Building is at 1414 21st Street, in downtown Vero Beach.
