This is the artist statement that Peter Holbrook wrote for his show at the Morris Graves Museum in Eureka California in August of 2012.
My first solo exhibition was in college at the age of 20 in 1960. Now at 72 I have been showing and selling my artwork for over 50 years. Apart from some Expressionist detours in my art school years I have always been a Realist. I have learned my craft through fine teachers and associate professors, but am basically self-taught. Most of my work has taken landscape as its subject and over the past 40 years, principally the Southwestern landscape-the Canyonlands. Beginning in the mid 1960’s I began to explore the use of photography for generating imagery. This placed me among the early Photo realists. But my approach was different from the more famous practitioners. Their subjects were urban, mine were wilderness, their surfaces were smooth and photographic, mine were painterly-with broken color and visible brush strokes. Although I was having a successful career in Chicago by 1970, I was an art world misfit.
Times have certainly changed. Landscape painting has gone from the least popular subject to being perhaps the most popular. I think this was due to a general revolution in consciousness afoot in the late 60’s. Rachel Carson (Silent Spring) had initiated the Ecology movement. The Sierra Club was winning the early battles to preserve the wilderness and recognize its spiritual values. Modern geology, with its new carbon dating techniques and discovery of plate tectonics gave us a new mental picture of the age and formation of the land. The Park System was rapidly expanding under the demand for the wilderness experience. Stuart Brand with his Whole Earth Catalog was educating a new generation of homesteaders. And NASA was showing us what our planet looked like from space- beautiful but somehow fragile. That was the world view and the mind set that brought me to Northern California in 1970. My generation of landscape painters have rejected most of the notable American landscape traditions; The Transcendentalism of Church, Bierstadt and Moran, The Romanticism of Inness and the Tonalists, and the mythologies of Manifest Destiny-The Cowboys and Indians and Cavalry of Remington and Russell. We don’t paint the land as a background to man’s endeavors but find meaning in the land itself. We are formed by abstractions, but trying to overcome its dead ends, trendiness, and above all rejection of nature as the source of understanding and inspiration.
I agree with Ken Burns that the National Parks were “the greatest idea America ever had.”Most of my work comes out of the parks. Many of these subjects are from The Grand Canyon, Zion, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands and Monument Valley. If the formations are not familiar it is because I worked through the most popular views and “vistas” years ago. Now I concentrate more closely on the details in an effort to continually find a fresh point of view that characterizes the location. Most of my field photography is done very early or very late in the day when the effects of natural light are most dramatic. Though each painting takes its design from one or several photographs, I am not copying the photographs, but rather editing and manipulating them to reveal the special qualities of the place and time. I think of each usable image as a “light event”- which passes in a moment with changing angles of illumination and weather conditions. This seems appropriate to subjects that reveal their story on a geological time scale. I invite the viewer to step out of normal time for a moment.
Be sure to check out Peter Holbrook’s work at these galleries as well as what is available through this website:
https://themarshallgallery.com/artist/peter-holbrook