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--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, to 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. Say, if someone in a painting is reaching into their pocket then we are left to conclude if they are putting something in or taking something out? What's missing from the scene? It doesn't take long before each of us individually reaches the inevitable need to invent the connections outright. We look sometimes between the most disparate and random sequences. We see what we expect to see, sometimes we fill in the blanks. Myths. As I get older, I can see myself as the person that I'm going to be, forever. Maybe it's the person that I always was- it's impossible to tell now. But i know that I don't have any obligations to the story about myself that I used to tell.