This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  INTERVIEW WITH PETER A NISBET (1994)
Copyright by Jessie Benton Evans
Jessie Benton Evans: What led you to art?
Peter
A. Nisbet: My mother, an artist in North Carolina, taught me the
fundamentals of painting when I was old enough to hold a brush. I took
courses at the Corcoran Museum and other lessons privately. In 1980, I
came to Scottsdale. I paint landscapes and skyscapes, "atmospherics,"
almost vapor paintings, which express my personal mythology that nature
is mysterious and miraculous. A fellow artist and I have chased storms
all over the Southwest and Mexico. Then, last year, I went to the Art
Students League in New York to study with Frank Mason, one of the last
great knowledgeable teachers of past paint traditions. I wanted my
paintings to speak the way "old master" pieces spoke to me in museums.
Evans: How do you put a painting together?
Nisbet:
I begin a painting as bright as possible, with red, yellow and blue
triads. This brilliance is transmitted through later, more subdued
glazes, creating values and sophisticated color relationships. My
compositions are intuitive. I check them later with Golden Section
ratios, a method from ancient Greeks of subdividing the rectangle into
dynamic proportions. All of my paintings have a brilliant source of
light from a specific place, with a starting and ending point, with
subtle transitions from brightest bright to darkest dark. The artist's
struggle is to get from one place to another in a painting, like a
symphony going from an opening passage to a crescendo to a dark
undertone.
Evans: What are some of the images you paint?
Nisbet:
Thunderstorms, night lightning, the moon over water, a fire at sea. A
marsh fire I witnessed on a Mexican delta looked like a volcano with
smoke rising 20,000 feet. In my painting, the ominous, backlit smoke
shape is like an oncoming great conflagration. "Adventure" in Mexico is
a romantic word for trouble. In deep wilderness, I feel incredibly
scared and incredibly reassured. After three days, the scales fall off
my eyes, I see where I'm at and it's amazing. That amazement is grist
for my creativity.
Evans: You speak of nature as spiritual, miraculous, mysterious.
Nisbet:
I've experienced in nature that Divinity is manifest in every aspect of
creation, from the biggest to the smallest. The largest forms replicate
themselves to the smallest levels. The Golden Section 1.618 ratio is a
number that occurs over and over again in nature -- in the logarithmic
curve of a wave, or your DNA helix or a Spiral Nebulae in outer space.
When things begin to organize themselves around constancies, one must
conclude there is some organization to all of this. It's highly
intelligent. It's so intelligent that the more you know about it, the
more profound it becomes and the more you relate to its divinity. So
for me, you can no longer paint optically off your retina. You're
short- circuiting what's going on out there. It's too deep for that.
Evans: How do you express this Divinity in paint?
Nisbet:
You have to use archetypes, myths and symbols to resurrect a visual
vocabulary which compellingly tells what you perceive your Divinity in
nature to be. I turn to the light in my paintings as an expression of
Divinity. All plants rotate towards the sun. We wake up in the morning
bathed in light and feel right about it, not wrong. If I could paint
with real light, instead of pigment, wouldn't that be wonderful?
Another
part of my spiritual understanding is that space is very important
towards well being. Whatever Divinity is, it's spacious. People
resonate in a place where they are surrounded by huge vaults of space.
Now, contemporary man feels uncomfortable with lots of space and likes
the presence of other people. I personally thrive being in an
existential bowl of space 150-200 miles long. In Mexico, I walked out
two miles on a tidal plain of inch-deep water reflecting the sky, so I
was walking on sky, with the desert spread 50 miles all around me. In
my work, I'm trying to resurrect that feeling of space and bathe all
the objects in an ethereal light.
So I take natural recurring
forms and create big shapes. The energy and shape of a fire cloud is
the same as a cumulo-nimbus, or a boiling pot of water, or a broccoli
stalk. The stalk is just the column of hot water. When you understand
this, your work is authentically placed.
If I take a cloud and
create shapes I've seen in a broccoli or a cauliflower, and I use the
Golden Section numbers, because I know they exist in nature and in my
DNA, to build that cloud, and then color that cloud with my particular
mystical color which is drawn from opal or pearl, and I put all that
together, then perhaps I'll be lucky enough to create an image that's
unique. I want to invest these images with the great energy of love and
respect I have for the natural world.
Source:
Jessie Benton Evans (the younger), Scottsdale, Arizona
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  A painter of stark, expansive vistas with subtle qualities of depth and
light, Peter Nisbet works from his studio near the bustle of Canyon
Road in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the same building occupied by John
Sloan in the 1920s.
He graduated from the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, with a degree in history and then received a
commission in the United States Navy, which included ten months in
Vietnam.
He began painting as a youngster and continued in the
Navy, where he did a ship's portrait that got him enough attention that
he was made Director of Art Services for the Navy's Office of
Information. Completing his Navy duty in 1974, he worked in Washington
DC for a graphic arts firm and then founded his own freelance
commercial-art business, which was quite successful.
However,
in 1974, a trip through the Sonoran Desert made him realize that he
wanted to focus on its austere beauty because it reminded him of the
vastness of the ocean he loved so much. He moved to Phoenix, Arizona in
1980, and in 1985 to Santa Fe, New Mexico. But he returns often to
Arizona, spending weeks painting and exploring barely accessible areas
with his four-wheel-drive vehicle.
He is one of the few artists
who has ventured into Antarctica, having received a grant in 1995 to
participate in the National Science Foundation's Antarctica Artists and
Writers Program. For several months, he worked out of McMurdo Station
on the edge of the Ross Sea and was much taken with the natural beauty,
strong light, and vast distances of that area. He returned with forty
paintings, and one of them was used on the jacket of the novel
"Antarctica" by Kim Stanley Robinson. He also paints the Grand Canyon
and other dramatic scenes along the Colorado River.
Basically
self taught, he credits English painter James M. W. Turner as his primary
influence. Before he starts to sketch, he walks the landscape for at
least an hour to get a sense of the place and then paints small canvas
sketches from which he makes larger studio paintings. He is committed
to conveying a sense of the spiritual in his work, a sense of that
which he finds overwhelmingly amazing.
Sources include:
Donald Hagerty, "In Search of the Spiritual", Southwest Art, February 1999
Myrna Zanetell, "Lure of the Landscape", Art of the West, January 2007
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Biography from Mark Sublette, Medicine Man Gallery:
| Peter Allen Nisbet began painting at the age of ten. After graduation from the University of North Carolina, he served four years in the U. S. Navy, including a ten-month tour of duty in Vietnam. During that time the secretary of the Navy appointed him to serve as Director of Art Services. After leaving the service in 1974, Nisbet worked as a freelance commercial artist, providing graphic design and illustration to over 25 national organizations.
In 1980 he abandoned commercial art for a painting career, moving to the Southwest. He has worked in numerous locations throughout Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and California, drawing inspiration from varied landscapes and creating work, which is linked to the painting tradition of 19th century American and European masters. Painting and exploration are important to this artist, as his 1996 journey to Antarctica indicates.
Nisbet was selected by the National Science Foundation to paint the ice continent, where his travels included spending a week at the South Pole. He has also been commissioned to do paintings for NASA’s art collection, images that have been prominently featured as a part of NASA’s promotional efforts.For Nisbet, paintings are a spiritual pursuit.
He seeks out places and circumstances in the land and sky to support emotional and intellectual concerns. His paintings emphasize a deeply held belief that the world and all within it are sacred, a belief which is similar to Native American spirituality.
Nisbet's painting language is deeply rooted in the past, since he believes that the highest standard of excellence for painting occurred before the onset of the twentieth century. To quote Donald Hagerty, author of "Leading the West", Nisbet "portrays the ragged slash of the Rio Grande River that bisects New Mexico's Taos Valley with transparent, atmospheric light and spiritual force, an image worthy of Frederick Church or Albert Bierstadt." |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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Peter Nisbet is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Painters of Grand Canyon
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