Peter Carlson painter
Info About Statement Curriculum Vitae Mailing List Links Contact Work		About Raised in small island community in Southeast Alaska, Peter Carlson has lived and worked in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Portugal. He has made his living variously as a fishworker, a longshoreman, a neon sign maker, an illustrator in the dotcom industries, and a waiter. His paintings spring vividly out of that varied background; they are a mixture of reportage pieces, travelogues, pages torn from old books, snapshots, fragments of newsreel. They are wildly diverse in subject and setting (they take place in office cubicles, in circus tents, in bars, on battlefields, etc) but are unified by what one might call their muscularity of form, their physicalness: an aesthetic of hard work. One is reminded of the paintings of farmworkers by Grant Wood, or the photographs of Lewis Hine taken at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Carlson