continued:
anyone but the local Indians, he happened upon remains of temples
at fifteen thousand feet being used by the Indians as corrals
and holy places. Once again finding in this unequaled stonework,
the beauty and craftsmanship, the "soul" that strongly influenced
his painting. |
This
abstract cyclorama illustrated the changing seasons of the
East as the viewer moved around the room by changes in palette
and mood. Peter was intending a meditative piece, but people
found it exuberant.
Peter
started experimenting with lithography and etching at the
Art Institute in San Francisco in the late 60's, moving on
to
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In
1985 he left the Bay area for the forests of New England.
He began combining the curved soft aspect of the pastoral
watercolor washes with the hard edge of collage, building
a tension similar to that between imposed architectural order
and "unruly" nature. Some of these pieces grew to be quite
ambitious in scale and concept, culminating in a piece over
a hundred feet long at the Springfield Museum of Art.
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papermaking
and monotypes in the early 80's at Magnolia Press, also in
the Bay Area. Moving into the 90's and continuing print making,
Peter went to Seattle to do traditional lithography on a large
World War II map press. A few years later at the Petengil
studio in Vermont he collaborated on experimental monotype
collages. By the late 90's he started making hybrid digital
prints in his own studio and with Greg Welch in the Boston
Area.
He
scanned his large shaped metallic paintings, and then subtlety
altered and combined this raw material on the computer. This
new form of image working could only have been built on the
previous 30 years experience in more traditional forms of
printmaking.
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Life on the East Coast centers on a home and studio complex
where he lives and works with his wife, Gayle Kabaker, an
accomplished illustrator. They have a daughter, Sonya (a Jazz
singer at 12) and son, Max who is six.
In
the early 90's, Peter joined with local arts activists to
found Partnership for the Arts in Western Massachusetts and
the Artbank, an educational and performance facility. This
led to a grant sponsoring Peter in a lecture series, "Twice
Seen".
The
idea being, that his many media and the visions they illuminate,
were all perceived with the same inner eye. Whether through
a lens or a brush.
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his vision
organized the world in the same way. Comparing photographs and abstract
paintings from very different times
and places over a twenty-year period, the similarities, as one might
expect, were astonishing.
Peter
doesn't see the studio bound paintings as entirely "abstract".
Sketching outdoors in watercolor while traveling he continues to
search for sources of soul, finding the time softened hard edge
of our old cultures moving him deeply once again. Thirty years of
wandering have taken him through ancient mud cities of Saharan Africa,
to Pagan churches in the remoter parts of Scandinavia, or to farms
high on the volcanoes of Central America and Mayan temples in the
dry heat of the Yucatan. His continuing travels have led more recently
to early Gothic skeletal ruins in Tuscany, <more>
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