Peter Rodulfo

PETER RODULFO

'As a man is, so he sees.' William Blake.

Does it follow that ‘As a man looks, so he is?'

There is something of Mephistophelse about Peter Rodulfo. Is it his piercing blue eyes, with their opaline whites? His wispy garland of hair? His wiry sprightliness? Whatever, there is just a hint of conjurer, magician, shaman, (even voodoo) in his 3-dimensional works).

Of mixed heritage - Danish/English mother, Trinidadian/German father. He was born in Washington D C (1958) and spent much of his childhood in Australia and India before the family settled in the UK. He was sent to Framlington boarding school, which he hated, and dreamed of stealing a boat and escaping back to India. He embarked on a fine art course at Norwich art school (1975-1979) and like many people who study there, stayed on in the City, with his wife Annie, buying a small terrace house in the Golden triangle. He is supernaturally prolific, producing a painting every two days, so that they soon outgrew the house. Also, the golden triangle is a lively community with a lot of socializing, which he found distracting. They needed a bigger house and more solitude.

He took the leap across the wetlands and marshes of the Acle Straight, with its treacherous ditches on either side to catch careless drivers, to Great Yarmouth, where they bought a 3 story Victorian house overlooking St George’s Park.

Norwich is chockablock with artists, with its thriving 20 Group, its gatherings and organized talks. Yarmouth is like another planet, rough and raw, its gaudy seafront and the magnificent Hippodrome, its decay, its herrings, its poverty. It attracts a grittier kind of artist who mostly set up shop in abandoned warehouses. With his international reach, Peter became affiliated to the Yarmouth Five, with their established dominance in the region.

We met up in the Hippodrome Cafe, with its raunchy 30’s decor, a life size elephant head waving its trunk over the bar. In the ladies’ loo there was a circus painting. I looked closer, thinking it might have been by Bruer Tidman, famed for his many circus paintings, but it was signed Peter Rodulfo, the fizz and dazzle of the subject attractive to both artists.

On this sharp but sunny morning in March we crossed St George’s Park to his 3 story Victorian House. I nipped into the bathroom on the way up to the studio and was struck by a painting of 3 sailing ships. It is by his father, Monty, an artist himself, who eschewed the hazards of the creative life for the duty of public service, but nonetheless encouraged his son to take his chances. The ship painting is a family treasure, its delicate gentleness and charm from a different era with a different sensibility. Access to the studio was a hazard as on one side of the stairs there was no rail or supporting wall. Annie went in front to ensure my safety while Peter followed behind. Security was not a priority. I don’t suppose it is for any artist.

Every wall was covered in paintings, every nook and cranny stuffed. A tortured tangle of clay models, borderline grotesque, jostled for space on ledges, windowsills and chairs. Art materials littered the studio floor, with canvasses stacked all around. De-cluttering came to mind. ’Where’s your easel?’ I asked, looking for a space in the crammed studio. ‘I don’t use an easel,’ he said, ‘I paint on the floor.’

It’s just as well that steady sales ensure that there is always room for one more. ‘I have to paint,’ he said, ‘I go mad if I’m not painting.’ Annie nods appreciatively.

Carnival is just one of the many strands of Peter’s work, each with different and distinctive color patterns. Exotic jungles, sun-soaked Caribbean beaches and food stalls, green landscapes, rocky mountains, seascapes of all kinds, water water everywhere, in lakes, streams, fountains, rivers, gleaming, flowing, bubbling, lapping. ‘What’s this about water?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know’ he replied, which just goes to show the folly of asking the visionary ‘to heave his art into his mouth,’ to provide the commentator with easy verbal handles.

I’m especially fond of the less exotic strand in his work, in the seedy, rundown streets of Yarmouth. They are not so much narrative, but have a strong literary quality, aka the melancholy of T.S. Eliot’s Preludes, ‘And now a gusty shower wraps/ The grimy scraps/ Of withered leaves about your feet/And newspapers from vacant lots/ The showers beat/ On broken blinds and chimney pots.’ They have the loneliness of Edward Hopper, people made conspicuous by their absence, but he always adds a magic touch: a dog lazes in the gutter, while a blackbird looks on; telegraph wires strung like a maypole above a back alley, the solitary smoker leaning on the dustbins. Despite the speed of his production, they are meticulously detailed. Under his brushstrokes, dullness becomes numinous, grimness magically real, as in the trampolinist bounced high above the chimney pots and clouds into the wide blue yonder. I was unacquainted with his work until I saw a picture online, a phantasmagoria of a car underwater, its occupants unperturbed while the water bubbles and seethes all around them in near-death tranquility. Reader, I bought it.

There are glimpses too, of the Yarmouth Five. Bruer Tidman next to a portrait of his mother, John kiki at a private view, whose dark ringlets and angelic face gives him the appearance of a Renaissance youth, a generous tribute to brilliant fellow artists.

‘Do you go looking for scenes to paint?’ I asked. ’I don’t need to’, he replied. ‘They’re everywhere, but unnoticed. That’s what I like to paint, the things that nobody notices.’

Trees are a favorite subject with their twisted winding forms and shapes. In this new show, witchiness has been replaced by enchantment; a gothic archway of branches is a portal leading to another world, from which Merlin might appear; a mangrove swamp gleams darkly against the white shine of a boat on the water. Birds and animals are a pervasive presence, kindred spirits; cats have Egyptian goddess undertones; dogs are protective guardians; a cockerel crowing outside a primitively beautiful hut is lord of the morning. Two fat jolly parrots in a zoo preside over a smorgasbord of fruity titbits. Above them a corrugated roof over their heads brings to mind the many synchronized images of waves of water and benches in earlier pictures; most serenely in ‘At rest’, a row of seagulls line up on a piece of jetty with a sky like angel wings spread over their heads. Industrial pipes and barbed wire rub shoulders with church towers. Metal skylines receive as much acknowledgement as water meadows and the romantic brick arches of old bridges. Trailing yellow flowers adorn an old fence, side by side with a dustbin. There is brightness in everything. The world is charged with wonder.

I marvel at the speed with which he takes in a scene, transposes it in his mind, transfers it onto canvas, with oils or acrylics, kneeling in that tiny space he clears with his bare hands in his studio. (I worry for his back) Thanks to his sense of urgency, which sees every day that he does not work as a lost painting. In all of them he finds the mystery in the mundane, the glow beneath the surface. What to call it? Art or wizardry? Who knows, with those opaline eyes and that Intensely engaged brain he delivers miracle and revelation.

Joyce Dunbar
March 14th, 2024

Peter Rodulfo was born in Washington D.C, USA, in 1958. His early years were spent in Australia and India before coming to England in the mid sixties. He was educated in Suffolk, before going to study painting at Norwich School of Art 1975 – 1979.

Since leaving art school he has exhibited all over the world in both solo, group and open shows.

Rodulfo has a prolific output in many different mediums, such as oil paint, watercolour, etching, bronze sculpture and assemblages. His work can be found in both private and public collections.

Exhibitions

1978  Solo Show -'Rare Bird', Norwich 

1980 Norwich 20's Castle Museum, Norwich 
Solo show Margaret Fisher gallery, London

1981 Maddermarket Theatre, Norwich 
Solo  Show - Woodstock Gallery, London

1982 Solo Show - Margaret Fisher, London 
Six Artists of Individuality, Ipswich
Norwich 20's - U. E.A., Norwich 

1983  Norwich 20's - Caste Museum, Norwich 
Manfred Schuler Gallery, Zurich
One Man Show - Christ's Hospital, Horsham 

1984  School House Gallery, Wighton, Norfolk

1985  Margaret Fisher, London 

1986  One Man Show - Kingsgate Gallery, London 

1987  One Man Show - Arts Centre, Lowestoft
Jablonski Gallery, London 

1988  Men at Work - Contact Gallery, Norwich 
Larger Works - Arcade Gallery, Norwich 
One Man Show - Danlan De Bairead Gallery, London 
School House Gallery, Wighton, Norfolk 
One Man Show - Contact Gallery, Norwich 

1990 Larger Works - Arcade Gallery, Norwich
Art'90 - Business Design Centre, London
Centre d'Art Contemporin, Rouen 
School House Gallery, Wighton
One Man Show - Contact Gallery, Norwich

1991  Art'91 Business Design Centre, London
Royal Society, Birmingham Smith's Gallery, London
One Man Show - Village Gallery, London

1992  Royal Cliff, Pattaya, Thailand 
Smith's Gallery, London
Mysterious Presence, Norwich
V.A.C. Hong Kong Museum, Hong Kong

1993 Castle Art Show ~ Castle Museum, Norwich
Touchstone Gallery, Hong Kong

1994  One Man Show - Heifer Gallery, London
Peterborough Museum - Heifer Gallery, Peterborough
Southwark Arts Festival, London
Miami Art Fair - Ho Gallery, U.S.A 

1995 Art'95 "Savannah", London 
Contemporary Print Fair - The Barbican, London

1996  Miami Art Fair, U.S.A 
New Mill Gallery, Norwich
Heifer Gallery, London
Price Waterhouse, London

1997  Wrentham Studios - "Shock of the New" 
Suffolk Polish Cultural Institute, London
Bergh Apton Sculpture Trail, Norfolk

1998  Wahrenberger Gallery, Zurich 
Sculpture Trail, Burgh Apton, Norfolk
New York Expo, New York

1999  Heifer Gallery, London

2000  Kelburn Castle, Glasgow
Royal Academy Summer Show, London

2002  Solo show, Auditorio Ambrosio Orepeza, Venezuela . 
Art of Imagination open show, Cork St. London. 
Solo show Gallerie du Marche Montreux Switzerland. 

2003 " Brave Destiny" New York and Florida 

2004  Solo show flamboyant, Gioania, Brazil. 
"Cor da Carne" Gioania, Brazil. 
Solo show Brazilian art exchange gallery, Brasilia, Brazil. 

2005 "Cor da Carne" Brasilia, Brazil. 
"Landscape 200" Castle Open Art Show, Norwich Castle Museum. UK. 

2006  Retrospective exhibition. Thin Cube Gallery, .UK

2007  Solo show "from Basel to Brasilia" Miami USA

2011  Two person show with Mark Burrell. The Playhouse Theatre, Norwich.UK

2012 "Outside the white cube" Open show Bermondsey, London
Open show. Radcliffe's and Newman's. London
"Vision and Reality" Norwich Castle Museum
"Race into time", with Stephen Vince. The Gallery, Cork St. London

2013 Solo show.  Da Wang Cultural Highlands , Shenzhen, China

2014 Feng Lin Shan shui International art exhibition, Shenzhen, China
Divine, Define Feminine. London. UK
Great Yarmouth Library Norfolk

2015 133 Gallery Great Yarmouth Norfolk
Halesworth Gallery Suffolk
'Paint' Market Undercroft, Norwich Norfolk

2016 Casa Tua, London
Skippings Gallery, Great Yarmouth. Norfolk

2017 Yarmouth 6 & Friends. Skippings Gallery. Great Yarmouth.

2018 Walking through Walls (solo). Skippings Gallery, Gt Yarmouth.

2019 Solo Show National Library, Port of Spain. Trinidad.
Tripp Gallery London. Magical Realism.
Primeyarc – Great Yarmouth ‘At the end of the lines’

2020 Chappel Galleries Colchester. ‘From Trinidad to Great Yarmouth’: solo exhibition.
Skippings Gallery. Great Yarmouth. Solo show.

2021 Chappel Gallery. Colchester. ‘Portraits and People’.
Yare Gallery. Gt Yarmouth. ‘Weathering.’
Yare Gallery. Gt Yarmouth. ‘Summer Exhibition’.
Yare Gallery. Gt Yarmouth. ‘Circus’.
Anteros Arts. Norwich. ‘Moving On’.
Ferini Gallery. Pakefield. ‘Making our Mark’.
Skippings Gallery. Gt Yarmouth. Solo show.
The art gallery. Lowestoft. Solo show.

2022 Yare Gallery. Great Yarmouth. ‘Yarmouth is Great’.
Chappel Galleries, Essex ‘Here Comes the Sun’ solo show

2023 Sir John Hurt Art Prize Shortlist Exhibition Glandford Studios, Holt
Chappel Galleries, Essex. ‘Sea and Sun’.
Mixed show Chappel Galleries, Essex. ‘Celebration and Compassion’. Mixed show

2024 Solo show Chappel Galleries, Essex. ‘As a man looks, so he is’ Peter Rodulfo, Recent work.