Josh Peters is a La based painter/ curator/ cool guy/ I chatted with him recently about his work, here it is. -Ryan Travis Christian
I'm from Massachusetts.. moved to NYC after grad school at Rutgers, spent 10 years there.... about half of which was spent art-making and half playing in a band. It got to the point in NYC where I was spending too much time working to support myself and not enough painting...so I moved up to Northampton, MA where I was able to afford to take a couple of years just getting back into it. In 2007 I taught painting for a semester at an art college in Oslo, Norway and then did a 3-month residency in Los Angeles, wanting to be back amongst a larger group of artists and a more active gallery scene. The residency was sort of to test the water in LA, and I loved it so ended up moving out here.. where I've lived for two years now... teaching and making my work.
The source material for the paintings are film stills... usually older ones where the sunspots and grain reference a previous era. In the newest work, the proportions of the canvas actually mirrors that of a widescreen cinema format. I choose the frames that strike an emotional chord with me, hoping that they will also resonate with viewers. So it's really done intuitively, without much thought to 'theme' but there are obviously common threads... groups of people isolated in nature and an ambiguity in terms of their identity and what exactly is taking place, as you pointed out in your question. So I would agree with that and say that it's intentional, as it hopefully creates a kind of compelling mystery and draws viewers in.
I should also say that the pieces that I'm working on now might well be the last that come out of this process; the process of finding a single, pre-existing image and translating it into paint.
The original image is also going through more of a transformation because the use of the materials is painterly and not deadpan, as in pop art, but just the same, I feel that with these paintings, once the frame has been selected, the die is cast and the work is half done... I'm hoping to start working more interpretively, more from the imagination, with chance and chaos coming into it more. I want to push beyond the nostalgia of these paintings.
I've never heard that term before but yes, as I said, I feel that once the frame has been selected, that the piece is to a large degree, determined.. there's still the question of scale and a lot happens intuitively during the painting process that is unplanned, but the basic composition and elements are in place. Sometimes the images are cropped, combined, or otherwise manipulated in photoshop but once the image is chosen (which sometimes happens only after months of deliberation), it gets printed out and brought into the studio where it is used as reference for the painting.
Both.. memory and sheer intuition.. and accident (which already happens a lot; accidents are allowed for and considered along the road to the finished painting). I think that they may become transmuted but I think that it will also be a matter of combining them in unexpected ways and with disorienting shifts in scale and the creation of more undetermined spaces that they exist within.
Until last year, I was only comfortable working larger but I found that working very small (under 20 inches or so) almost replicated the sense of expanse of a large canvas because you have to get so close to it, that through the intimacy that's created, it can have a similar impact. I completely see them as equally substantial pieces.. in fact, I think they've allowed me to expand the vocabulary of my brushwork.
I just lay it down and respond. The color is purely instinctual and relates (or responds, as you said) to the surrounding colors in a way that pleases me. I honestly don't think of it as skewed or surreal but actually in perfect harmony! It makes me think of something that Paul Westerberg (Front man for 80s punk band The Replacements) once said when a critic complimented his band on their sloppy, always-on-the-verge-of-chaos style. He replied, 'We were actually trying to sound like the Rolling Stones!'. Well, I'm just trying to do color like Matisse. I guess even if I'm always falling short, if you shoot for such a lofty ideal, at least wherever you end up will hopefully be somewhere interesting.
I think that whatever I'm currently reading (usually fiction but sometimes biographies) is usually the biggest influence, actually. One always is forced to visualize when one reads and I find that this makes for great inspiration. Even in the past when I was working from film stills, sometimes the original impetus to seek out a particular film had come from reading a book (Lord of the Flies, for example). I was seeking an existing form to filter my own impressions through but from now on, as I have said before, I will be skipping the step of the pre-existing image and just going at it from my imagination.
There's a show that I'm going to be a part of next year here in Los Angeles at the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts. It's called Chasm of the Supernova and is being curated by Adam Miller. Some of my favorite painters are going to be in it; Annie Lapin and Peter Saul among others. Very excited to be in that company and plan on making some new work for it.
It's hardly an original answer but I can't think of any invention that I"d rather make a reality than a time machine. I gre up in a small town in Massachusetts and would love to go back and see it during colonial times, and even earlier when it was still Native American land. Ancient Egypt, Feudal Japan, Roman Empire.. almost anything in the past would be fascinating. No interest in going into the future, though. So that's it.. .the good ol' time machine. That or velcro socks.
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