Introductory Essay – Between Flesh and Brick

This privacy has allowed Peter to develop a profoundly rich and complex body of work, but, as the artist acknowledges, his solitary practice has cut him off from the feedback loop central to art’s significance. As he puts it: art is meant to communicate, to speak to an audience. We are very fortunate to be able help complete the task of Peter’s paintings, to interrupt the solitude that has nurtured a vision which is private, yet speaks to universal human experiences of loneliness, terror, alienation and the sublime joy rendered by human perception, sensuality and connection.

Peter’s mother, Bessie, had an enduring influence on his personal and artistic development. An adventurous soul, especially for a woman in the 1950’s, Bessie was fascinated with American culture, jazz music in particular. She owned a small selection of albums (records were an expensive and coveted possession at that time, and Peter’s mother struggled to make ends meet). Peter and Bessie listened to Earl Garner, Ella Fitzgerald and the soundtrack from Carmen Jones over and over again throughout his childhood. Later, Bessie had a relationship with a drummer from Trinidad, who also turned out to be a kind of father-figure to Peter. He turned Peter on to the jazz greats of the Bebop era like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane. The sounds and feeling of that music, with their achingly beautiful riffs, syncopated rhythm and collision of order and frenzy infuse Peter’s paintings to this day.

Peter loved art class in elementary school, where he painted with oil on Masonite boards a couple of hours every week. He remembers getting hooked on the texture and the smell. In high school he met Jens, who remains his best friend until this day. Jens, who later became a professional composer and music educator, learned about jazz through Peter. Through Jens, Peter met Ole Skoul Olsen, Jens’ father and a painter. Over many years, Peter maintained a dialogue with Olsen, whose interest in urban landscape bordering on abstraction Peter shared. Peter’s haunting images of city rooftops viewed from the height of elevated trains although painted in and about New York City, draw on Olsen’s vision of the unique light and fractured angles of the city.

After high school, Peter spent some months in London before returning to Copenhagen to study literature at the university. Peter, always a voracious reader, was especially drawn to the work of the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy, the Danish writer Henrik Nordbrandt, the Italian writer Italo Calvino and Tolstoy. His literary interests sometimes inform his choice of themes and imagery. One of the feet paintings, with the image of a subway in the background, is a reference to the tragic conclusion of Anna Karenina, when she throws herself in front of a train.

Opportunities to view modern and contemporary art in Copenhagen were fairly limited. The most important modern art museum was the Louisiana Museum where cutting-edge art was shown. Most of this was influenced by the painterly neo-expressionism of the Danish Cobra movement and later, Per Kirkeby. The museum also had a few paintings by the American color field painter Morris Louis, a few works by the Bay Area artist Richard Diebenkorn, whose light filled, painterly abstractions appealed to Peter, and pieces by the Swiss artist of existential meditation, Alberto Giacometti, whose lonely and isolated figuration left an impact on him.

Peter also frequented the massive Royal Academy Library, checking out as many books about painters as he could find, and discovering a keen interest in the British painter Francis Bacon. From there he found several volumes on Abstract Expressionism, and was immediately taken by its expressive, improvisational qualities, much like the jazz music he already adored. One afternoon, checking out a book on Diebenkorn, Peter met another young artist, Per Traasdahl, who had just come back from studying at the New York Studio School, an independent art school in Manhattan formed by several second-generation Abstract Expressionist artists. Per was the first young artist Peter met also interested in painterly abstraction and the New York tradition. They became fast friends, and shortly thereafter Per talked Peter into taking a leave of absence from his job at the hospital and going to the Studio School to study with the well-known teacher Nick Carrone. Unfortunately, Peter found out upon his arrival that Carrone was no longer there. Nonetheless, through the influence of teachers and other students Peter was exposed first-hand to the New York (via Europe) post-war painting tradition, which included intensive studies of color theory based on the work of Josef Albers, figurative abstraction in the manner of de Kooning, and a focus on the materiality of paint and the subjectivity of the gesture as epitomized by Jackson Pollock. He absorbed this history, the energy of New York life and access to the city’s great museums. In this context, the Abstract Expressionist tendencies in his paintings were given full reign.

By 2000 Peter had moved to his present home with Avery, who worked in an architecture firm located on the third floor of tower number 2 at the World Trade Center. Avery and his colleagues made it out before the tower collapsed on 9/11, but the tragedy brought home to Peter his vulnerability as an outsider in the United States without health insurance and shortly afterwards he took his nursing exam and got a job as a nurse on the long-term intensive care unit at Goldwater. He also started thinking about how to reintroduce the figure into his work and began his series of feet paintings, many of which are in this show. It was with these paintings that his work became more thematic, serial and cinematic. He was still profoundly concerned with formal issues, but the narrative elements of the work became more important, personal and biographical.

In 2005, Peter’s grandmother, with whom he had been extremely close, passed away. Peter painted a series of hands, including the painting of hands growing out of a forest, inspired by his grandmother’s hands. Then, in 2008 Bessie was diagnosed with a rapidly progressing form of ALS. While she was sick, Peter painted a single hand, fingers delicately pinched around a flower, which he called Shaken this Has Left Me. Peter explains this painting as a reflection about his mother’s illness but also about the inherent beauty of life. With his mother’s progressive illness and eventual death in 2010, Peter’s paintings, now fully committed to a representational language, began to more directly express themes of anxiety, alienation and loneliness. He produces a series of meditations on the isolation of the observer (literally, the eye or I) of urban life featuring subway cars, high above the city, with a single eye staring out of the window into the dark night. Another series, based on the image of a stag, began as a personal challenge to create an interesting painting using the banal, vernacular image of a stag by a lake so popular on the walls of Danish summer homes. The first of these, Stag and Orange Landscape, is reminiscent of the color saturated landscapes of the Cobra movement, but in subsequent portraits the stag takes on an increasingly terrified expression, as though facing the gun of an invisible hunter about to fire. Red Balloon, also from that period (and not part of a series) shows an older, balding man standing in a field, with outstretched arms, his back to the viewer, watching a red balloon float off into the sky. Inspired by the short film about a boy who befriends a red balloon who leads him through the streets of Paris, this painting suggests the fleeting nature of relationships, bounded by inevitable loss and the sublime contingency of human life.