Peter Carlson

117 Harrier Ridge Road

I have always been a narrative painter. That is, a painter who creates imagery grounded in story. The advantage of working with recognizable forms is to set the viewer up with expectations. I work from this impulse.

The stories we tell are variations on time and go back as far as time itself and before that even: to marks on stones and mountains dragged by ice. I see our description of the human experience in time as fables. Small pieces from the middle of a larger account-- sharks' teeth and horsetail. Moss and flight. Think of those painters who made work for a religious setting.

I believe that we are compelled to story, establishing and refining our understanding of how it all fits together, to understand what we're doing here and why. It's the obligation of narrative. If someone in a painting is reaching into their pocket then we are left to ponder, are they putting something in or taking something out? What's missing from the scene? It doesn't take long before each of us feels the need to invent the connections outright between the most disparate sequences. We see what we expect to see until we don’t, then we fill in the blanks.

There's the conflict. It's inherent to every story and likely to communication itself, who said what when and after that what next. It's the basis of narrative: setting, character, and line of action. But what happens from there is where we have a choice, because to resolve these differences is to recognize that we are both right and wrong all at the same time. I try to paint about this too.