The Turn Around is a lithograph created in 2015 by American artist Peter Baczek. It was printed with the aid of James Claussen at the San Francisco Academy of Art on ivory Rives BFK. The Turn Around is pencil signed, titled, dated, and editioned 6/60 and the image measures 15-13/16 x 11-7/8 inches. It is the first lithograph he produced, after working in other media, in forty years.
In his work, Baczek focuses on the urban landscape. He stated, “Urban landscapes capture what we all create in our environment. Throughout our lives we modify our living and working spaces to fit our needs. We are constantly surrounded by an ever changing landscape of mood and color that I capture in various media.”
Robert Flynn Johnson, formerly of the Achenbach Foundation of Graphic Arts, wrote: “Peter Baczek focuses on the dynamic geometry of the city in his pristinely rendered etchings and aquatints, often utilizing light and the absence of figures within the man-made urban environment. His refined sense of structure… links Baczek with many of the Precisionist artists of the 1930s such as Charles Sheeler, Ralston Crawford, and George Ault, whose art was a distillation of the subject rather than an over-delineation of details within the subject. Baczek’s subject matter of ordinarily overlooked street corners, rooftops, and foliage is made compelling by the force of the artistic compositions that he creates from the commonplace.”
Peter Baczek, painter and printmaker, was born in Webster, Massachusetts in 1945. He moved to California and the Bay Area in 1963 and received his BA in Art with a concentration in printmaking from San Jose State University in California in 1970. Baczek moved to San Francisco in 1975 and continued his studies, concentrating on etching, at Fort Mason Art Center in San Francisco. He bought a Sturges CP5 press in 1980 and has been an independent artist since then and his studio is in Oakland, California.
Baczek is a member of and exhibited with the
Boston Printmakers and the California Society of Printmakers, and served on the
Society’s Board of Directors as its President, 2014-2015. His work has been
included in national and international print competitions, garnering numerous
awards. He has participated in many group shows in galleries and museums,
including the Berkeley Art Center, the Triton Museum, the Tokyo Art Museum, the
Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tucson Museum of Art,
and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Peter Baczek is represented
in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Janet Turner Print
Museum, University of California, Chico; the Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco, California; the Tucson Museum, Arizona; and the Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
