”...the thicket grew, and, I thought, the thicket is rolling on unceasingly, I was in a rolling swarm where something constantly surfaced, who could remember, grasp, so much, so much…” from Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz

NP Contemporary Art Center is pleased to present Daniel Peddle’s, UNDERTOW. This latest series of paintings, curated by Nicola Vassell, explores life’s constant “undercurrent”—the pull of the earth to return us to its womb.

Four years ago, while making his second feature documentary, Trail Angels, Peddle encountered what hikers call “the green tunnel”, a hallucinatory effect wherein the woods seem to engulf one’s path. These dreamlike moments walking behind a friend in the forest became the catalyst to a much larger truth: “The earth wants you back,” he explains. “It is always waiting to receive you.” The experience returned him to a youth spent playing in the abandoned barns and empty houses immersed in the thickets of rural North Carolina. Peddle’s work comments on the power and beauty of rot, which points always to this undeniable fact: in spite of our increasing separation from the natural world, the frothing shore will eventually devour us.

These intimate paintings hover gracefully close to the precipice, and though the edge is profound, it is not necessarily dark. Peddle’s subjects are most defined here, at their own vanishing point. While punctuating a horizon or playing at the shore, they confirm our ultimate unity with nature and also our unrelenting fear of her. Nature disturbs the boundaries we have erected to protect us; she creeps into the recesses of our machines, cherished emblems of modern life. In the painting, Underhood Undertow, a lone surfer stands perplexed before his stalled truck engine as the glorious swelling tide looms. In Searching Too Close To The Shore, a modern Don Quixote is drawn towards the sea in a treasure hunt that will surely short circuit his metal detector. And Cindy Into The Woods depicts a woman following a dark trail, one that doubles as a greedy tongue lapping her into the throat of the woods.

The mixed media of UNDERTOW—an eclectic brew of acrylic, oil, gouache, watercolor, and charcoal—floats on the wooden surface like a mirage. Brushstrokes vanish amidst a precarious balance between that which is applied and that which is effaced. Some paintings realize a seventies “groovy” splendor; others appear cold and grey – an effect achieved through layering varnished washes. Like the subjects themselves, the paint takes on an ethereal quality, as if their permanence is in doubt: still subject to the weather. The small size of the works further reinforces the shrinking quality of the subjects. Viewers will identify with their haunting plight.