User:Peterjewelmz

Rural Georgia Artist, Peter Martin Muzyka: [www.petermuzyka.com]

Peter Muzyka has been drawing and painting since childhood.

While in the US Navy between 1964 and 1975, Muzyka practiced his drawing and painting skills doing works for the military and for friends and collectors in Japan, South Korea, and South Vietnam. Peter entered the Navy wide art competition and show in Norfolk Virginia in 1974 where he won first place in oil painting. Although Muzyka had begun art instruction in the mid 1960’s with Pennsylvania artist Andrew Palencar, he began painting in earnest after leaving the US Navy in 1975. He studied painting and illustration techniques under popular animal artists Robert C. Kray and George Luther Schelling. While at college, Muzyka was selected to develop murals related to the Nation’s Bicentennial in Luzerne County, PA which eventually became a permanent part of the Luzerne County Art archives.

He won Best In Show at the Plymouth, PA art competition in 1977. Two of his paintings were chosen as a part of a permanent memorial exhibit to honor the memory of Howard Purcel, one of Muzyka's mentors and a founder of the Luzerne County Community College commercial art school. In the 70’s, he received many commissions for portraits and other works for private estates including the estate of the actor Jack Palance. Peter Muzyka moved to Georgia in 1982 where he began painting in egg tempera. His selected subject was Georgia’s rural landscape, with its deteriorating farm houses, old plantations, colorful earth and plant life. Painting the vanishing old farmhouses, cotton mills and other representative structures which reflect the colors and textures of nature moved him to represent nature's way of reclaiming man-made structures. In most of his paintings and drawings he would work to achieve a sense of proportion between nature and human constructions. Along with egg tempera, Muzyka works in India ink with a crow quill pen and occasionally in watercolor, oils, and pastel.

In 1989, Muzyka's painting “Georgia Lace” was chosen for purchase by the Georgia Arts Acquisition Program and became a permanent part of the art collection at Gainesville Community College in Gainesville, Georgia. A fine art print of this work is also hanging at the University of New Mexico as a part of their permanent collection. He continues to have had artist co-op and one-man shows in Georgia, including Madison, Millidgeville, Cartersville, Athens, Union Point, Dalton, Macon and Atlanta.

In 1997, Muzyka received an honorable mention in the Georgia Watercolor Society’s annual juried show in Gainesville, Georgia. In 1998, a painting representing Steamtown National Park in Scranton, PA entitled “In The Roundhouse” was juried into the top 100 touring exhibit by the National Foundation for the Arts for the Parks in Jackson, Wyoming. The painting along with the other 99 depicting our Nation’s Parks traveled to several locations across the United States and sold to a private collector in New Orleans while on tour.

In 1999 Muzyka started a fine art print company, Vanishing Rural Georgia Art, using the Giclée process to produce quality prints for both painters and photographers in the region.

Peter Muzyka's work appears in public and private collections in the United States, Japan, South Korea, Belguim, Canada, and Mexico.