Artist Profile: The Art of Living Dangerously
Photo by Jody Forster
Peter Allen Nisbet in the field
Peter Nisbet suffers for his art. Just as English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner lashed himself to the mast of a ship, Nisbet swam the rapids at mile 215 on the Colorado River, in the middle of the Grand Canyon. “I was a drowned rat,” says Nisbet, his blue eyes bright. “I was hyperventilating and overwhelmed. But now I understand the waves.”
The 60-year-old self-taught master landscape artist and Santa Fe local—whose recent painting Light Storm, Taos won the Henry Farny Award for Best Painting this fall at the Eiteljorg Museum’s third annual invitational Quest for the West art show in Indianapolis—started painting driftwood at age ten. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, he joined the Navy and, based in California, spent all his leave time exploring the Grand Canyon and Sonoran Desert. Later moving back east to his parents’ house, he set up a studio in his old bedroom and set out to master the serious business of painting cumulonimbus clouds. But, he says, “I couldn’t pull it off.”
Nisbet eventually moved to Scottsdale and finally mastered clouds, canyons, water, waves, and sky, all while surviving the perils of Mother Nature. Once, in Yosemite, a lightning bolt swooped out of the clouds and took static electricity off his easel. In Antarctica, a pod of penguins waddled up to his camp at 3 am and watched him sketch. On the coast of Oregon, Nisbet was almost knocked off his feet by rogue waves. Luckily, he managed to save his 7-by-10-inch Study for Cape Kiwanda, which at press time hung at Meyer East Gallery (among several other scenes) beside the much larger and more luminous end result: Cape Kiwanda.
I meet Nisbet and his chow, Homer, on a sublime autumn Sunday in his studio off Garcia Street, which was built by artist John Sloan in 1922 and sits far off the street in a grove of fruit trees. On an easel in the middle of the old adobe sits a gray study of the Grand Canyon; below it is a pile of rocks, which he uses as inspiration to mix his colors. Nisbet’s willingness to get out in the elements is only half the reason his work is featured in high-profile places, like on the cover of Leading the West, a 1997 book of 100 top nonurban Western representational painters and sculptors. The other half involves the intensive composition process he engages in after returning to shelter.
The present work in progress, called Undercurrent, is a study of light racing across the canyon walls, like water running down a stream bed. “I’m thinking of painting this as if it’s under water,” says Nisbet as he mixes a blob of dark gray and starts making aggressive brushstrokes over what already looks like a perfectly well-balanced study. “See how I’m opening up the surfaces?” he says. “It’s all plastic; nothing is set in stone. By manipulating shapes and dominant angles, and creating dominant rhythms, I try to move the eye into periods of relaxation and contemplation. The point is to hold the eye.” To finish this piece and at least ten more in time for his Grand Canyon opening at Meyer East next August, Nesbit will take two to four more trips to the national park. Six months from now, he hopes to have completed his first painting.
“The truth of it,” says Nisbet, “is that painting is just a path. It’s like being a priest or an explorer. It’s a way of journeying toward a piece of knowledge that you really want. I’m nowhere near the level of J.M.W. Turner, but maybe I’ll paint one or two paintings that can stand next to his by the time I’m dead.”
P.A. Nisbet, Meyer East Gallery, 225 Canyon #14, 505-983-1657, meyereastgallery.com
