Westbeth Lobby: PETER RUTA Landscape Paintings

Peter Ruta is a landscape painter primarily but in winter in recent years he has painted indoors, mounds and heaps of fruit, flowers and vegetables,that could be called indoor landscapes. And sometimes he combines the two approaches, as in the three large works (4×5 feet) currently on display in
the Westbeth lobby hallway.

Rome with vegetables began as a view from a terrace on via Aurelia, overlooking the Vatican cupola and a modest modern neighborhood of pink stone apartment houses, but in the studio this past winter the cityscape opened to admit a large congregation of
fruits and vegetables, and a couple of climbing houseplants, turning the whole into a cheerful baroque composition that seemed like just what was needed
to mark the passage from a long hard winter in downtown Manhattan, to a late, gratefully welcomed spring.