Fall River artist’s paintings to be exhibited at Bristol Art Museum

VaselineMay 18, 2024

1 6 minutes read

Fall River artist’s paintings to be exhibited at Bristol Art Museum

TIVERTON — When Peter Strickman was a young man, searching for meaning and beauty in the world around him and capturing them on canvas, his art teacher made a strange prediction.

He told Peter “I would leave the world in thirty years…begging me to leave something behind the world before I leave the world behind.”

Anyone would be unhappy with that. Peter took it as gospel. He spent twenty years – from the late 1960s to the 1970s – producing literally hundreds of oil paintings of every imaginable subject. Peter created vibrant still lifes, abstracts, nudes, portraits, landscapes of places around his native Fall River.

In his thirties, tormented by inner demons, he suddenly stopped oil painting, “fulfilling the wishes of my teacher,” he wrote.

Peter did not leave the physical world until he was 70 years old. But he left behind a huge body of amazing artwork that spent decades in storage, unseen. His sister, Bonnie Strickman, looks after them.

Fifty of his paintings will be on display at Bristol Art Museum from 8 June to 20 July, with an opening reception on 9 June. It is a rare exhibition of work produced by a talented and unknown Fall River artist.

“I’m happy to be the archivist,” Bonnie said. “I just have to figure out how to get them out into the world and create value for him as an artist and a unique human being. I try to honor him. He is my brother.”

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The history of Peter Strickman in Fall River and how he became so prolific

The Strickmans lived for years at 525 Weetamoe St. Peter was the middle child of Leo and Marjorie, he a businessman in the paper and bookbinding industry and she a teacher at Somerset High School. They were members of Temple Beth El and were prominent in the theater community.

Bonnie, the youngest, said her older brothers Michael and Peter were both “geniuses – geniuses, actually”. Both of her brothers attended BMC Durfee High School but never finished, yet both were intense and studious, gifted in foreign languages, intellectual and well read.

But Peter, she said, was special to her, kind and generous with a poet’s soul. As a child, he played the guitar and she sang. “So he had the melody and I had to sing harmony,” she said.

Growing up, she lured her dog Topsy into her bedroom with a piece of cheese and locked her up to smother her with love. “I tried to dress him up and get him to wear clothes,” she said. “They would complain and complain.

“Pete would leave his door open, the incense burning, beautiful music playing… and Topsy would climb the stairs and lay on his rug. And I was so jealous because my dog loved him more. But he was just open,” she said.

Years later, he caught Topsy lying on the carpet, ink on paper, on her birthday.

Peter had gotten his foundation in painting from Barbara Alpert of the Greater Fall River Art Association and wanted more. He skipped his senior year at Durfee to study art at Marlboro College in southern Vermont, where he graduated in 1967—and where professor Frank Stout made his ominous prediction.

Peter became a working artist. Gallery curators loved his work, which has a spontaneous, free-flowing feel with playful use of color and broad, impressionistic brushwork. He has had numerous solo exhibitions of his work – of which he has generated much, consistently.

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When he returned to Fall River, he later wrote, “I got up at three or four in the morning, meditated for a while, and drove to my very large studio downtown. I would prepare my materials, pack them into my little truck, and head out into the beautiful countryside surrounding the city. I would settle down and start painting right after sunrise.”

Bonnie said Peter often drove to Sakonnet Point in Little Compton and other points in Tiverton. Some of his paintings depict Fall River’s mill chimneys with the Taunton River beyond.

Rather than classifying himself as one type of painter or another, “He called himself a ‘river artist,'” Bonnie said, drawn to the soothing flow of water mirrored in the swirls of color on his canvases.

Peter was extremely prolific, painting everything — some paintings depict ordinary objects such as fire extinguishers, pickle and ketchup bottles, coat hangers — “experimenting,” Bonnie said. He placed his friends on chairs and sofas and painted their portraits in exaggerated, cutting movements, sometimes nude. He sold many of his paintings. Others, gave away. Most, he kept and stored, and made more, more. He produced hundreds of works.

At thirty, all oil painting ceased. Of this, he wrote simply: “That was the end of my professional work. … I retreated to a deep visionary spiritual life.”

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Why Strickman stopped painting and what happened to his work

Peter had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in his twenties, a mental illness characterized by periods of psychosis and ruptures with reality. Visual and auditory hallucinations often result. Bonnie said Peter heard voices. He turned to spiritual studies.

“It seemed like every religion was fighting for its soul,” Bonnie said. “In a different culture, he might have been considered a mystic.”

He was hospitalized several times. The illness made it difficult for Peter to work as he did – Bonnie said she thought he shouldn’t be making carved images and wanted to leave “painting and color permanently behind”.

Bonnie said that when she was given strong medication to treat her illness, it also sapped any remaining desire to paint in oils. He settled in Boston. She said he was a lover of life, made lifelong friends in elevators and remained creative.

“He wrote spiritual biographies and poetry and published poems,” Bonnie said. “He was very bright – but a sweetheart.”

What remained of his vast art collection—paintings he did not sell or give away—was stored in the basement of a family friend’s home for more than 20 years until, in his advanced years, he- they asked Bonnie to retrieve them.

“And then they became mine,” she said. “I’ve had them for a long time. As long as he was alive, he just wanted nothing to do with them.”

Bonnie is an artist in her own right. A former New York jazz singer, she returned to the area and lived for years in Newport, Rhode Island. She stored her brother’s paintings in a van as she moved from house to house, eventually settling in Tiverton.

The walls of her house are decorated almost exclusively with her brother’s work. In the upstairs rooms, dozens and dozens of canvases are mounted on stretchers; others remain unstretched. He also maintains a collection of hundreds of scrolls of paper on which Peter made Zen-inspired ink paintings later in life, which he created just for himself as a spiritual practice.

On one wall is Peter’s last painting, which he did in 2003. It depicts what could be a landscape of mountains or trees – bold black angles in the foreground that quickly recede into fog-like grey.

“It was for my mom,” Bonnie said. Their mother had suffered a stroke and was at the Clifton Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Somerset. “So he wrote on the back, ‘To Mom, with all my love.’ He did one and stopped. And that was it.”

“I have to get these paintings out into the world”

Peter passed away in 2017. Bonnie takes her role as custodian of his artistic legacy seriously. Before his death, she documented all of his known surviving works, printed a catalog, and gave him a copy. It is available to view online.

“I am honored to be a trustee. I just want to do the right thing,” she said. “He was extremely talented and unique and I just want to honor him. So many people respond so strongly, so positively, to these paintings.”

Among them is Nancy Whipple Grinnell, author and curator emeritus at the Newport Art Museum, who has supported her work. She has shown Peter’s work in several of her exhibitions and is curating this latest exhibition for Bristol Art Museum, ‘Reflections of an Inner Life: The Art of Peter Strickman’.

The museum is at 10 Wardwell St., Bristol. Hours are Thursday through Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m. A discussion about Peter’s life, with Grinnell and others, will be July 14 at 2 p.m.

Wherever Bonnie travels through Greater Fall River, she said, she sees the landscapes her brother saw and painted.

“I feel like if I could paint, I would want it to look like this,” she said. “I’m talking to myself. And I’m from this area. He was so influenced by her.”

Her mission is to spread their beauty and keep her brother’s spirit alive.

“This was a really interesting project. I feel like I have to get these paintings out into the world.”

Dan Medeiros can be reached at [email protected]. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Herald News today.

VaselineMay 18, 2024

1 6 minutes read