The world of Peter Layne Arguimbau is a recreation of a lost era with life today. Approaching this uniquely enchanting enclave, surrounded by 200 year old stone walls moss laden roofs with meandering English styled gardens, you are lead to a stoic New England barn perched on a hill overlooking a great pond. As one enters this Renaissance styled studio/gallery/workshop/barn it is dark in contrast to the lush landscape outside. Shapes and colors appear out of the dim light, as your eyes awaken you are treated to a visual supper a world of yachts, sunsets, farm yards and animals, and portraits of people you think you know.

Born in 1951 in Darien, Connecticut on shores of Scotts Cove and spending summers painting from Maine, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard and Buzzard's Bay, it is no small wonder Connecticut Luminist Peter Layne Arguimbau has the sea churning through his veins. (Note: Since the age of fourteen, the artist has signed all of his works using the name Layne, to help to differentiate his work from the work created by his late Father, Vincent Charles Arguimbau, a well-known portrait artist). Primarily recognized as an accomplished marine artist, Peter Layne Arguimbau's works exhibit a rich, glowing, old world quality and tranquil reality reminiscent of the Dutch Masters. He paints in a variety of themes, ranging from marines and seascapes, portraits to farm animals. These successful executions by Layne Arguimbau are the result of the carefully studied light effects of the sky, wind and water composed and executed in a Flemish technique using fossilized amber with numerous glazes of fast drying color, thus resulting in deep, luminous transparencies identifying the painting uniquely as a work by Layne Arguimbau.

Peter Layne Arguimbau and his wife Mary Sinclair Fawcett, and two children, Andre 15 and Terra 13 with their Labrador Retriever, Molly Rose reside in backcountry Greenwich in a spacious, light-filled and not so surprisingly, uniquely modern farmhouse, tastefully designed and built by the couple over a period of five years. The red barn and out buildings were part of a historic farm and mill pond where the chicken coop (now called the Doll House) is used as Mary's study and also doubles for a guest cottage. The tractor barn is her Yoga studio where she has been conducting Iyengar Yoga classes for the last 15 years. Mary's canvas is her beautiful gardens.

The 1850's chestnut barn is where the artist produces and exhibits his work. The sweeping pastures of neighboring Lion Share Farm dotted with it's many horses and the beautiful stone walls meandering all throughout the property offer the tranquil pleasure and charm and the privacy sought after by the serious artist needing a place to truly concentrate. In Layne Arguimbau's North Light studio with only, one very large window facing north covered entirely with shutters, he has replicated the lighting of Vermeer's own studio. This enables the artist to beam a shaft of light down on his subjects in a controlled manner where the light remains constant. During the summer, the artist is sailing, Molly Rose, a classic catboat built in Martha Vineyard in 1935 with a 12 ft. beam and a living room size cockpit which suffices as a studio on the water away from home.

Peter Layne Arguimbau was handed a brush by his father at the age of eight, painting under the tutelage of his father, a respected portrait painter they painted portraits in the winter and landscapes in the summer. In that same year he met to Frank Mason, with whom the artist studied for fourteen years before choosing to live in Italy.

There the artist spent three years studying the Baroque era and Hellenistic classicism copying from the great galleries in Florence and Rome and statuary from the archeological museums in Naples, Athens, Olympia, Delphi. These periods are the focus of his special interest - incorporating the technique of the Flemish Masters. Arguimbau quotes,

" I love Rembrandt for his emotion, Rubens for his versatility and technique, Velasquez for his spontaneity, Vermeer for his harmony and light."

It was on his return to his native town of Darien in 1985, he found the love of his life and opened a studio on Long Neck Point on the shores of Long Island Sound. He immediately bought a cat boat and began to paint marines. In 2000, in a large catboat, he followed the Tall Ships 'Forth of July' from New York Harbor to Boston. Layne Arguimbau specializes in classical nautical paintings of the Americas' Cup Races and also New York and New England harbor scenes, featuring every class of vessel ranging from fine racing sloops, schooners and tugboats to wooden catboats and dinghies. These highly prized executions have earned him many yachting commissions. His last commissions include 'Paraiso' 105 ft Ted Hood design, Alloy Yacht; 'West Ray', a Concordia Yawl; 'Odalisque', a 115 ft. Fed Ship, 'Ticonderoga' by L. Francis Herresoff. He painted a ships portrait of 'Adela', a 174 foot restored schooner for George Lindlemann. Now he follows Classic regattas from Antigua to Maine often on his chase boat "Paint Brush", which he trailers to events to photograph.

Peter Layne Arguimbau comes from a long heritage of American Art starting from the "New York Realist School" with over a hundred years of experience. This tradition started with Frank Vincent DuMond, who taught at the Art Students League and summers at Old Lyme where he became a founding member of the Lyme Art Colony. There he taught Margaret Wilson, the wife of Dr. Woodrow Wilson. DuMond and William Metcalf became inseparable friends. Other notable students of DuMond that came to make up the "New York Realist School" are Gifford Beal, Everett R. Kinstler, Art Manor who began the Red Barn school in New Jersey, Bob Mionne, Herb Abrams, Ogden Pleissner great American sporting artist, Vincent Arguimbau and Frank Mason, who continued DuMond's class in studio 7 at the Art Students League.

DuMond taught at the League for almost sixty years, coming from the Academie Julian in Paris instructed by Jules-Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger winning recognition in the prestigious Salon. He taught by giving critiques on the students work where he would place a "D" in the upper left hand corner giving it his signature of approval. He continued to teach 'Realism" in the traditional language of art despite the growing movement of Abstract Art including such noted artists as, Jackson Pollack who studied at the League.

Frank Mason had studied with Frank Vincent DuMond at League for fifteen years and when DuMond died in 1951 Mason, he took over the class in studio 7 and continues to teach at the League today. Frank Mason has been teaching 'Realism" for the last half century especially in the sixties when 'Realism' was a dirty word. It was at this time Arguimbau began to study with Frank Mason at the League and his summer courses in Stowe, Vermont which he continued for fourteen years.

When Frank Mason came to the Arguimbau home in 1958, he brought with him the newly found Maroger Medium (closet known medium to Flemish Technique at present) which Reginald Marsh had given him. Layne was a very impressionable eight years old.

"Immediately descending into the basement, we were on verge of recreating the Renaissance, and began boiling linseed oil with litharge, diluting mastic crystals and making lead cakes for preparation of lead grounds for canvas. A thick coil of smoke from boiling the lead and oil permeated the house and my Mom freaked."

Jacques Maroger was the inventor of Maroger Medium. The curator for forty years and Director and Curator of Painting Restoration at the Louvre, came to the US on the rumbles of World War II and in collaboration with sculptor Hans Schuler began the Schuler School of Fine Arts in Baltimore in the 1950's. Baffled by the lack of quality in modern painters such as the American painter, John Singer Sargent, whose paintings after less than fifty years the blacks were cracking, prompted Maroger to investigate painting mediums of the Golden Age. In 1948 he published " The Secret Formulas and Techniques of the Masters" describing the first lead mediums leading up to Van Dyck, Rubens, Rembrandt where he noted he had discovered 90% of the formulas of the Masters and produced his own Maroger Medium. A noted artist in his own rank he started the Schueler School in Maryland. Layne Arguimbau feels there is no question that the Flemish School with its impeccable quality and technique has stood the test of time. The period, 1450- 1650 from first generation Van Eyck, second generation Brueghel and third generation Rubens were the greatest guilds ever assembled. Modern painters of the 20th C have no background in technique and are subject to much experimentation. This motivated this artist to want to learn every thing there is to know about Flemish Technique.

For ten years Arguimbau simultaneously worked with restorer, Piero Manonni, trained at the Instituto del Restauro in Rome under Cesere Brandi, analyzing and replicating painting mediums from 15th & 16th C manuscripts. Analyzing every component of the Maroger Medium, because in some paintings it had the disastrous effect where the varnish turned black after a few years, the artist became involved in other mediums of harder resins, unlike Maroger which used mastic, (a soft resin found mostly in Crete and used for chewing gum.) Amber is the hardest resin known to man and creates a plasticized natural coating that has a built in barometer to expand with hot and cold that has endured for centuries, unlike modern synthetic polymer resins and varnishes that are so brittle they cannot expand and contract cracking and lifting after a decade . Fusing fossilized amber into an oily-resinous medium is not an easy undertaking, yet there is nothing like it in quality. Layne specializes in hard resin mediums of amber and sandarac, also very difficult to manage, avoiding soft resins, like dammar and mastic which can not create the profundity of the darks and transparencies of the hard resins and are not as stable. Arguimbau uses primarily raw materials and in the forty plus years he has been painting, paint materials have changed dramatically sometimes mediums or colors have disappeared entirely. "This doesn't bother me." He says, " I have my own workshop where I have been making my own mediums and grinding pigments for years. I would be frustrated if I had to reinvent my technique over and over again ever time a product disappears." Layne is now assembling his book. "The Invention of Oil Painting, a technical analysis from The Renaissance to the Present."

Arguimbau remains a purist; grinding his paints from powders and preparing oil-resinous mediums in the old tradition, he prepares all his grounds for panels and canvas and in addition adds hand-finishes to his frames. By grinding pigments from powders, Layne can achieve heavy thick impastos and ultra thin glazes of color to create the contrast of opacity and transparency necessary to create illusion. This drive to fully understand and involve himself in the entire painting process, working through all the artistic problems as they have come up finally emulating the Renaissance experience has given Arguimbau the confidence to tackle any artistic challenge.

At first glance the art of Peter Layne Arguimbau looks old, something you have seen before. It is only on a closer look that you are caught by surprise; the subject is current, right now, alive with color. This language of expression uses traditional techniques to give life to days subjects, a new look through old eyes not shocking but intensely subtle and beautiful. Arguimbau's technical expertise combined with a "Light effect painter" blending transparent luminosity in creating magnificent effects from the natural world gives his h'oerve a lasting Old World quality that brings the viewer back again and again and again.