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Peter Allen Nisbet has been a painter for close to thirty years. He comes from what one might call the School of Nature, where classrooms have been great landscapes, and his teachers were the many experiences accumulated there. Long ago he learned to search for precious moments made up of intangible things: the light on the land; a powerful cloud; the vastness of deep space.
As a boy he discovered these things along a remote stretch of North Carolina coast known as Currituck, where he was raised among people who hunted and fished and loved a sunset on the water. It was here as a child, during the summers of the early 1950’s, that Nisbet first gazed out upon a vast expanse of water and sky. Currituck is the kind of place that plays host to big weather. Hurricanes, waterspouts and terrific thunderstorms are constant players on this grand atmospheric stage that encompasses the Outer Banks.
There is also a colorful history of ocean related lore that includes pirates, shipwrecks and heroic rescues at sea. The absolute sublimity of life and death on the edge of this water world played a large part in forging the artist's creative imagination. Because both his mother and grandmother were painters, Nisbet's path was set rather early in life. He began to paint around the age of twelve. As he explains, "painting was just something I did well...it came to me as naturally as breathing".
By the 1970’s when Vietnam forced its way into American life, Nisbet sought comparable experiences at sea with the U.S. Navy. He photographed fleet manuevers from helicopters in the South China Sea, and watched ships dodge typhoons that swept in from the central Pacific. In spite of the conflict it was a great joy for him to be out on the ocean. Military related travels opened new worlds to explore artistically, the most important of which was the American West. When his ship was in port he journeyed to the deserts of California and Arizona on weekends. Nisbet was enthralled with the history of the West. The struggles of people played out in a land of such stupendous magnitude proved irrresistable. Following military service he moved to Arizona in 1980.
About this time, Nisbet met and formed a significant artistic friendship with a great photographer, Jody Forster. His work can be found here. Forster shared a passion for the land and his art form that made an excellent match with Nisbet. They began explorations throughout the remote deserts of Arizona and Mexico for decades, beginning a dialog on nature and light that continues to this day.
Both artists found particular solace in the most remote places; areas like the Sonoran Desert and the canyons of Arizona and Utah. In the early 80’s Nisbet began to develop a particular fondness for the Grand Canyon and its artistic heritage. What began as a series of weekend camping trips along the rims blossomed into a life long commitment to the Canyon and its river corridor. Twenty years of exploration and nine Colorado river journeys later, paintings from the Grand Canyon comprise a significant part of the artist's work.
By the 1990’s exploration travel had become a necessary part in the creation of new painting ideas. He sought places farther and farther from home. Ultimately, with the help of the National Science Foundation, he wound up painting at the South Pole. Nisbet stayed and worked on the southernmost continent for three months in 1995. An excerpt from his Antarctic Journal describes what it was like to paint in such an inhospitable environment. Other journeys followed, including a unique opportunity to paint the space shuttle for the NASA art program.
A rather large part of his work dwells on the sky and its many manifestations. There are precious few examples of sky painting in the history of art. Nisbet found in the atmosphere an endless variety of shapes, colors, and manifestations of light to work with. The sky became his principal muse. Now he most often ventures out from his home in New Mexico to experience what he believes are the finest skies in the world.
In summation, the artist offers the reader this closing thought: "Painting is really just a process of becoming more aware, not unlike hiking or reading a book. It is a journey laced with a lot of magic. It starts in a myth of place and people, and meanders along pathways pointed out by past sojourners. We actually do stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, and they are never far from mind when paint is being mixed. Art has always been a vehicle that transported me to a grand Romantic world. In the land and in the sky I find the stories that animate us all, the same stories that captivated my forefathers. All of our myths as a people come from living and dying in these grand spaces. As Americans we tend to look ever westward to some distant horizon. When I imagine the story of my own life, I see only this: a vast chromatic distance, a layered, transparent landscape, and a journey without a destination through great vaults of stone, light, and space". |
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