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Art Gallery su 15
by Michele Malinchak
Henry David Thoreau once said, “Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.” As a photographer, museum curator, musician, composer, arts administrator, teacher, writer and critic, Brian Peterson has spent a lifetime keeping busy. Throughout his multifaceted career of more than three decades, success has met him on many levels. A fearless explorer of the arts, he said, “I became an artist because I thought it was the only way to find the truth about myself.”
Photography is his main passion and since 1980 he’s had more than thirty solo exhibitions of his work. His photographs are in the permanent collections of several museums nationwide, including the Library of Congress and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ranging from nature studies and portraits to more recent experiments in abstraction, his photos are charged with light and movement. “I love light, am instinctively drawn to it,” Brian said, “and it just keeps showing up in my work, unasked for, but always welcome, and always approached with reverence and praise.”
His use of light has been described by critics like Edward J. Sozanski of The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Peterson is as much a poet as he is a scientific observer... He displays mastery of using light not only to define natural forms but to make them shimmer with the music of creation... When he shows you a tiny twig glowing as if charged with a heavenly aura, you can almost see the aura yourself."
Ellen Rosenholtz, former director of the Lancaster Museum of Art said, “Peterson uses the camera to capture movement, contrasts of light and dark, and the visible that is often taken for granted … his photographs transcend the realm of objects to speak about matters of the soul.”
His love of nature was instilled at an early age out west where he grew up. He was born in Wyoming in 1953, but just weeks after his birth the family moved to Missoula, Montana. As a petroleum geologist for Shell Oil Company his father travelled state to state and also taught geology at the University of New Mexico. His logical mind was rooted in science, but he was also a dreamer who loved nature. Brian would often accompany his father on fishing and camping trips as a boy and later as an adult. On one of their many outings, a maple seed floated down from a tree and his father picked it up. Examining it in his hand, he asked his son, ”Do you think you could have designed something like this?” Brian answered something like “sure,” but the event etched upon him the simple beauty of nature.
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