Peter Ruta Latest Work

“Why is the background in your still life paintings blue?”, a viewer asked Peter Ruta recently, and then the asker answered herself, “Because the sky is blue and you used to be a landscape painter.”

In fact Peter Ruta, 98 this year of 2016, never stopped being a landscape painter.

His work of the last few years, done in his 7th floor Westbeth studio could be called indoor landscapes.

He began this long ambitious series in 2001, after losing his priveleged perch in the communal studio on the 91st floor of the North Tower, World Trade Center. An early resident of Westbeth, for many years he also painted the twoeres and their surrounding neighborhood, from the roof of the building. Several of these city views are in museum collections in New York and in Europe.

These still lives are shown here for the first time.