In a bright studio in Jim Peters’ summer painting workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a slender red-haired woman is lying nude on the floor on a bare mattress. Students are at various stages in their paintings; a woman in a paint-splattered red jumpsuit sits on the floor opposite the model. She is adding white highlights to accentuate the volume of the figure. The model turns her head and looks up with a brilliant smile: it is Kate Carr, the woman Peters has been living with for over a year.

If it weren’t for the allure of the female figure, Peters would have become an architect. Or a nuclear physicist. But he fell in love—with paint, with the female form, and now, with Carr.

Peters received a Master of Science degree in nuclear physics from MIT, while on a planned leave from the US Navy in the latter 1960s. He started drawing belowdecks of the USS John F. Kennedy, in the bowels of darkness, which may have influenced the darkness of his palette.

“I had all this engineering from the naval academy and MIT, so I thought I’d just combine the plastic arts with the engineering and be an architect. But I started painting, and—blammo!—I went to art school, and never stopped.”

Peters’ exhibition history reaches back over thirty years. Most recently he has shown at Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, MA, at ArtSTRAND in Provincetown, MA, and at ACA Galleries, in New York. His work is in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the William Benton Museum, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT; and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, among others. This August, at ArtSTRAND, several of his newest paintings were shown for the first time. This fall, Jim Peters On Stage: Recent Paintings and Constructions will be on view at UMass Dartmouth through October 21.

The artist moved to Rhode Island last year, after nearly three decades in Wellfleet, where he ended a twenty-nine-year marriage with artist Vicky Tomayko. His similarities with Picasso do not stop with his spectacular draftsmanship, but in his psychic reliance on a muse that is central to his life. Carr is that muse now.

“What drives me to paint is the human figure, particularly the female figure, and so I just keep painting it. Sometimes I start a still life or a landscape, and it just turns into a figure. Or I cut it up and stick it into a large figure painting as a still life with a figure. I don’t believe in greatly distorting the figure, so I rely on the construction of different ways to ignite the surface of the painting,” Peters says, to add texture, dimension, and surface interest, to an otherwise classic figure painting technique. He paints in oils on canvas mounted on board, to withstand repeated treatments with palette knife, disc sander, and other tools.

For instance, he adds sundry materials to his paintings: masking tape, fabric, occasionally photos, additional wood extensions that continue the imagery, and sometimes coverings of glass. But he often changes a painting, almost entirely replacing the figure; he sands it down, he changes direction, leaving small traces of the earlier pentimenti; he adds color, he adds a glaze, he draws along the bottom of the paintings, in miniature still-lifes, graffiti, dialogue bubbles. The process remains part of the final painting, and the longer you look, the more you see. It is a long process in which the painting is often entirely transformed, with only nominal hints of earlier incarnations. Some take a year to complete, while others have been changed years later, and carry two dates.

Peters paints from his memory and imagination, not directly from life. He likes to paint a world of sensual intimacy reminiscent of Bonnard, by using his own domestic interiors. His new life with Carr has sparked some changes that are just working their way through his painting. The palette has begun to include more color, and the compositions are showing different perspectives. In Morning Bed I, a white figure bathed in light lies in a colorful room with floral wallpaper, in a style closer to Bonnard than previously evident in his work. In another small painting, Show Me, a musing Picasso-like boy gazes, almost as a voyeur, at a nude female figure. Spring is a jumble of two bodies making love, in a combination of cubist movement and modernist abstraction. The influences of these well-loved artists are always present in his work; but in these newer paintings, they are more overt, more daring. He is taking risks, experimenting a bit.

“The painter doesn’t just all of a sudden—swoosh!—become a different kind of a painter. It takes a while for things to wash through, and to enter into the lexicon of the paintings. I would like to get a little warmer palette and a little more color into the painting. I want to be a little more risky with some of the imagery. I’m trying to find a new way to say some things—and it is difficult. But it’s part of the wonderful challenge about making paintings.”

Picasso is one of the strongest influences in Peters’ work, especially paintings from the Rose period that preceded his rupture with representational imagery into cubism. He lists Matisse and Bonnard as key influences, though he is more of a linear painter, like Picasso, or Ingres. He loves Philip Guston, whose labial-shaped forms are mimicked as cushions in bedroom scenes. Recently the ghosts of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec have appeared in some of the imagery. In the enormous painting entitled, Whose Dream is It Anyway?, a female figure lies suspended against a black ground, with her head dramatically thrown back. She is looking up, one arm raised straight up in the air, her flamelike hair falls behind her; painted in the heightened shades of a Toulouse-Lautrec theatre painting, in which stage lights cause dramatic emphasis and dark mystery. Apollinaire and Ginsburg are two of the poets named on the canvas. “To be passionately accepted for who I am” is scrawled near the bottom of the painting.

Whose dream is it, then? He says of his new relationship with Carr, “It’s the first time I felt I could really be myself.” In relationships, he said, he always tried to be what the other person wanted him to be. Perhaps this explains why the heads on many of his male figures are sketchy, unfinished, obscured. “That’s because I am the artist, I don’t have to fill it in,” he explained in a recent studio visit. The focus is always on the female figure, or the combination of the male and female figure, engaged in physical intimacy. His self-referential form is recognizable: long, lean. Usually the female figure is better articulated; the male is a foil for the female; he is the necessary prop for the theatre of the relationship in a domestic setting. Often, his face is obscured, if visible at all, or the head is behind the woman; it is incomplete.

Kate Reading, recently shown at ArtSTRAND, has gone through three transitions in the past year. When shown first at Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge last December, (Kate) Carr’s face was partially obscured, some compositional elements were not in balance; her left hand was held at an unnatural angle. In June, an addition of bright red striped fabric yanked the composition over to one side; the force of the color was too much. He took the painting back to work on it further. By mid-August, the head had changed, Peters had now captured Carr’s gentle, thoughtful aspect while reading; more of her face is visible, making the painting more inviting than in earlier incarnations. The colors had been adjusted and the figure’s left hand had been redone in a more natural position. It had the feeling of balance, of being finished.

“I keep changing the painting. If I’m not absolutely satisfied I alter it—like an early Truffault movie—altering the scenes, changing the objects, people come in, and go out, but then when I get it so I like it, it’s like a freeze frame—poof!—like in Jules and Jim.”

“But some people advise me just to stop, stretch a new canvas. But if I don’t like it, I keep changing it, and for a painter, every change is final, you can’t go back. But that forces you to try different ways to solve a problem. And painting, like physics, is really just trying to solve problems. So that’s the fun part, not knowing where it’s going to go, and then just taking that ride.”

In another new painting, 74, Rue de Charonne, an entirely different composition and figure occupied the painting last fall. A woman posing doggy-style on a bed in a darkened room was the centerpiece of the painting. It was provocative, but without much fire or passion, despite the risqué pose. The title of the painting refers to the little apartment Peters and Carr rented in Paris last summer, and where they returned this July. It is as if the time in Paris represented a long-awaited period of consummation of their unexpected and inconvenient affair. In the newest version of the painting, on the theatre of a large disheveled bed, a woman with a red braid leans toward the reclining figure of the male nude, whose head is obscured by her upper body. She is the vision of post-coital bliss, eyes closed, the gentle smile of contentment on her face; a satisfied glow of joy envelops the painting. Autobiographical in its emotional intent, the figures again resemble the artist and Carr.

In earlier paintings of Carr, Peters has reworked the face and other aspects, as if he were still trying to get her down right. Some seemed flat, still, the face unsmiling, distant, unknown. In 74, Rue de Charonne, her beauty and his feeling for her shine through. She is a poet, and in drawings and paintings she is often holding a book in hand, reading. In this painting, at far left, nearly coming out of her hip, a pencil and part of a hand are visible. Because she is a writer, he wanted to keep it in there. It is from yet another earlier version of the painting in which she was lying on the bed writing in a book. At the core of this painting is the firm grounding of excellent draftsmanship, which he lets show; allowing traces of earlier lines reflecting movement, change of position, to remain in the final painting.

Peters and Carr were just back from that trip to Paris, where they had spent time reading the French symbolist poets. They went to visit Apollinaire’s grave at the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery, where Edith Piaf and Jim Morrison are buried. On a warm July day, Carr stripped off her clothes on the spot, and lay down against Apollinaire’s headstone. Even in Paris, people stared. On a recent visit to his studio in Pawtucket, I saw a large print of the resulting photograph tacked on the wall, likely to reappear in some future painted imagery. The integration of Peters’ intimate life with his muse and his artwork are moving him in new directions, and he is thrilled to be taking that ride. n Ellen Howards is the editor-in-chief of Art New England. She teaches magazine writing at Emerson College.

Ellen Howards is the editor-in-chief of Art New England. She teaches magazine writing at Emerson College.