Grackle

About Lamar Peterson

Peterson was born and raised in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Central Florida, educated on the east coast, had a studio practice in Brooklyn for ten years, and relocated to Minnesota in 2011. This biography and geography, along with a sense of fantasy voyeurism inform many of his visual chronicles. Mining imagery from popular culture, science fiction, landscape painting, fairy tales, art history and comic books, Peterson creates candy-colored, fictional fantasy-filled narratives that are immediately inviting and playful. His cast of whimsical and quirky human and non-human characters, adorable pets, aliens, machines and amusing props interact within magical bucolic settings, calm oceanfronts before majestic mountain ranges, and otherworldly space-scapes. With a signature style and distinct mythology, ideas about family and relationships and childhood and maturity are core to his representational narrative and inventive storytelling.

Exploring male experience, with a cheerful approach, Peterson’s figurative impulse evokes notions of joy and antagonism, as well as reality and absurdity in surreal and humorous renderings. Not immediately apparent is a masterful use of the sublime; as the journey of seeking the American dream unfolds, so too does conflict, difference, alienation, vulnerability and fear. Peterson’s colorful vignettes, portraits, window views onto the world, and often bizarre juxtapositions share beauty and contradiction through themes of love, family and desire, alongside a capricious fascination with frustration, futility and irony. Peterson constructs a hard-edged tension between delight and danger that approaches the absurd as he diverts pleasure in compositions that seem to taunt innocence, mock rationale and ultimately explore humanity with a jovial punch.