Peter Burega confers a personal vision of nature in his art as an intangible, ethereal place of light and color. His meditative abstract paintings take visual cues from the natural world, but preserve a quality of mystery that distills his scenes into a weightless dance of elements: light, color, shadow, and temperature. By removing any obvious allusions to identifiable landscape forms, Burega transforms our sense of place into that of an infinite beyond. Burega expresses his contemplative response to nature in part through careful nuances of light, shadow, and color, which he skillfully applies in layers. Intertwining warm wisps of ochre, briskly refreshing blues, and other subdued passages of color, Burega’s art gives the sensation of emotionally charged air, both weightless and expressive. Though Burega’s works may contain vague hints of what we might recognize as land, bodies of water, horizon lines, or sunlight cast from above, they suggest places where we might perceive with our imagination or intuition rather than with any of our five basic human senses. Enlisting dynamic textures, subtle harmonies of color, and radiant light to suggest a range of emotion tonalities, Burega’s paintings become windows into the uncharted landscapes of the inner self. Countering the immateriality of Burega’s images are their lively, variegated surface textures. Building his work through layers of brushed and scraped paint, Burega utilizes sgraffito and other subtractive processes to induce dynamic rhythms of space and depth. The duality between vaporous image and physical surface provides enough footing for our imagination—or our subconscious—to co-inhabit the realm of feeling contained in each painting. Peter Burega was born in 1965 in Montreal, Canada, and currently lives and works part of the year on the island of St. Martin, French West Indies and part of the year in Savannah, Georgia. He trained as a concert pianist at the Royal Conservatory of Toronto, received a B.A. in Art History and Sociology from McGill University in Montreal, and subsequently earned a J.D. from Whittier College in Los Angeles. His art is included in numerous collections across the United States.