Peter A. Nisbet Born 1948

INTERVIEW WITH PETER A NISBET (1994)
Copyright by Jessie Benton Evans

Jessie Benton Evans: What led you to art?

Peter A. Nisbet: My mother, an artist in North Carolina, taught me the fundamentals of painting when I was old enough to hold a brush. I took courses at the Corcoran Museum and other lessons privately. In 1980, I came to Scottsdale. I paint landscapes and skyscapes, "atmospherics," almost vapor paintings, which express my personal mythology that nature is mysterious and miraculous. A fellow artist and I have chased storms all over the Southwest and Mexico. Then, last year, I went to the Art Students League in New York to study with Frank Mason, one of the last great knowledgeable teachers of past paint traditions. I wanted my paintings to speak the way "old master" pieces spoke to me in museums.

Evans: How do you put a painting together?

Nisbet: I begin a painting as bright as possible, with red, yellow and blue triads. This brilliance is transmitted through later, more subdued glazes, creating values and sophisticated color relationships. My compositions are intuitive. I check them later with Golden Section ratios, a method from ancient Greeks of subdividing the rectangle into dynamic proportions. All of my paintings have a brilliant source of light from a specific place, with a starting and ending point, with subtle transitions from brightest bright to darkest dark. The artist's struggle is to get from one place to another in a painting, like a symphony going from an opening passage to a crescendo to a dark undertone.

Evans: What are some of the images you paint?

Nisbet: Thunderstorms, night lightning, the moon over water, a fire at sea. A marsh fire I witnessed on a Mexican delta looked like a volcano with smoke rising 20,000 feet. In my painting, the ominous, backlit smoke shape is like an oncoming great conflagration. "Adventure" in Mexico is a romantic word for trouble. In deep wilderness, I feel incredibly scared and incredibly reassured. After three days, the scales fall off my eyes, I see where I'm at and it's amazing. That amazement is grist for my creativity.

Evans: You speak of nature as spiritual, miraculous, mysterious.

Nisbet: I've experienced in nature that Divinity is manifest in every aspect of creation, from the biggest to the smallest. The largest forms replicate themselves to the smallest levels. The Golden Section 1.618 ratio is a number that occurs over and over again in nature -- in the logarithmic curve of a wave, or your DNA helix or a Spiral Nebulae in outer space. When things begin to organize themselves around constancies, one must conclude there is some organization to all of this. It's highly intelligent. It's so intelligent that the more you know about it, the more profound it becomes and the more you relate to its divinity. So for me, you can no longer paint optically off your retina. You're short- circuiting what's going on out there. It's too deep for that.

Evans: How do you express this Divinity in paint?

Nisbet: You have to use archetypes, myths and symbols to resurrect a visual vocabulary which compellingly tells what you perceive your Divinity in nature to be. I turn to the light in my paintings as an expression of Divinity. All plants rotate towards the sun. We wake up in the morning bathed in light and feel right about it, not wrong. If I could paint with real light, instead of pigment, wouldn't that be wonderful?

Another part of my spiritual understanding is that space is very important towards well being. Whatever Divinity is, it's spacious. People resonate in a place where they are surrounded by huge vaults of space. Now, contemporary man feels uncomfortable with lots of space and likes the presence of other people. I personally thrive being in an existential bowl of space 150-200 miles long. In Mexico, I walked out two miles on a tidal plain of inch-deep water reflecting the sky, so I was walking on sky, with the desert spread 50 miles all around me. In my work, I'm trying to resurrect that feeling of space and bathe all the objects in an ethereal light.

So I take natural recurring forms and create big shapes. The energy and shape of a fire cloud is the same as a cumulo-nimbus, or a boiling pot of water, or a broccoli stalk. The stalk is just the column of hot water. When you understand this, your work is authentically placed.

If I take a cloud and create shapes I've seen in a broccoli or a cauliflower, and I use the Golden Section numbers, because I know they exist in nature and in my DNA, to build that cloud, and then color that cloud with my particular mystical color which is drawn from opal or pearl, and I put all that together, then perhaps I'll be lucky enough to create an image that's unique. I want to invest these images with the great energy of love and
respect I have for the natural world.

Source:
Jessie Benton Evans (the younger), Scottsdale, Arizona

A painter of stark, expansive vistas with subtle qualities of depth and light, Peter Nisbet works from his studio near the bustle of Canyon Road in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the same building occupied by John Sloan in the 1920s.

He graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with a degree in history and then received a commission in the United States Navy, which included ten months in Vietnam.

He began painting as a youngster and continued in the Navy, where he did a ship's portrait that got him enough attention that he was made Director of Art Services for the Navy's Office of Information. Completing his Navy duty in 1974, he worked in Washington DC for a graphic arts firm and then founded his own freelance commercial-art business, which was quite successful.

However, in 1974, a trip through the Sonoran Desert made him realize that he wanted to focus on its austere beauty because it reminded him of the vastness of the ocean he loved so much. He moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1980, and in 1985 to Santa Fe, New Mexico. But he returns often to Arizona, spending weeks painting and exploring barely accessible areas with his four-wheel-drive vehicle.

He is one of the few artists who has ventured into Antarctica, having received a grant in 1995 to participate in the National Science Foundation's Antarctica Artists and Writers Program. For several months, he worked out of McMurdo Station on the edge of the Ross Sea and was much taken with the natural beauty, strong light, and vast distances of that area. He returned with forty paintings, and one of them was used on the jacket of the novel "Antarctica" by Kim Stanley Robinson. He also paints the Grand Canyon and other dramatic scenes along the Colorado River.

Basically self taught, he credits English painter James M. W. Turner as his primary influence. Before he starts to sketch, he walks the landscape for at least an hour to get a sense of the place and then paints small canvas sketches from which he makes larger studio paintings. He is committed to conveying a sense of the spiritual in his work, a sense of that which he finds overwhelmingly amazing.

Sources include:
Donald Hagerty, "In Search of the Spiritual", Southwest Art, February 1999
Myrna Zanetell, "Lure of the Landscape", Art of the West, January 2007

Peter Allen Nisbet began painting at the age of ten. After graduation from the University of North Carolina, he served four years in the U. S. Navy, including a ten-month tour of duty in Vietnam. During that time the secretary of the Navy appointed him to serve as Director of Art Services. After leaving the service in 1974, Nisbet worked as a freelance commercial artist, providing graphic design and illustration to over 25 national organizations.

In 1980 he abandoned commercial art for a painting career, moving to the Southwest. He has worked in numerous locations throughout Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and California, drawing inspiration from varied landscapes and creating work, which is linked to the painting tradition of 19th century American and European masters. Painting and exploration are important to this artist, as his 1996 journey to Antarctica indicates.

Nisbet was selected by the National Science Foundation to paint the ice continent, where his travels included spending a week at the South Pole. He has also been commissioned to do paintings for NASA's art collection, images that have been prominently featured as a part of NASA's promotional efforts.For Nisbet, paintings are a spiritual pursuit.

He seeks out places and circumstances in the land and sky to support emotional and intellectual concerns. His paintings emphasize a deeply held belief that the world and all within it are sacred, a belief which is similar to Native American spirituality.

Nisbet's painting language is deeply rooted in the past, since he believes that the highest standard of excellence for painting occurred before the onset of the twentieth century. To quote Donald Hagerty, author of "Leading the West", Nisbet "portrays the ragged slash of the Rio Grande River that bisects New Mexico's Taos Valley with transparent, atmospheric light and spiritual force, an image worthy of Frederick Church or Albert Bierstadt."