DAVID ALLAN PETERS
DAVID ALLAN PETERS
CHROMATIC REVELATION: THE ART OF DAVID ALLAN PETERS
By Stephen Wozniak
“I think that in order to be an artist, you have to move. When you stop moving, then you’re no longer an artist.”
— Agnes Martin
“The creation of the visual universe is the result of the combination of colors and forms in perpetual movement.”
— Victor Vasarely
“Once I’ve finished a group of paintings, I’m like, ‘I gotta do another one!’ I have so many ideas that I want to make happen. (Laughs). And I’ve got to stay alive to do that, which means I’ve ultimately gotta keep moving!”
— David Allan Peters
Left & Right: David Allan Peters, Untitled #10, (Detail), 2024, Acrylic on panel, 72 x 60 inches (182.9 x 152.4 cm).
Right now, in David Allan Peters’s studio, I’m looking at Untitled #10, one of his latest paintings, completed in April. It is the very largest among nearly five hundred works produced over the past twenty-five years that make up his oeuvre. But I wouldn’t know that at this particular moment because my eyes peer only a few inches away from the center of its surface. My peripheral vision is filled to the brim with a deep, dancing dispersion of rainbow-bright hues and ellipses-dimpled textures, which I secretly run my hand over. Sight and touch and my collective perceptions are tripped and tipped by colliding color, tethered texture and the miracle of movement—over and over again. The painting then comes into wider focus as I slowly step back and marvel at this sizeable piece in silence. Wow, what just happened, I wonder? It’s quite an experience, a journey that sages would say brings you a thousand miles to a land of discovery. Here, in this painting, an equal number of cuts reveal layer after layer of fractured time, inner spaces, and acts of God—all handled in stride by an earthly artist on a modest mission who goes to work every day like a bricklayer, building castles in the sky. Luckily, Peters puts “foundations under” those proverbial structures, as the philosopher Henry David Thoreau suggested, turning eternal dreams into vivid reality, so we can see them all.
Before I say any more about his work, however, I’d like to talk about Peters. While we’ve now entered the ultra-automated, cyber-physical, artificially intelligent era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, I believe that art doesn’t make itself. Artists make it. And prior to the declaration and confirmation of that assumed creative role, they were and are the people who help guide the evolving throughline in their lives and, in turn, their art. Much has been written about the rigorous methodic attention Peters pays to the creation of his work but what motivates Peters, the person, in his continuous aesthetic quest? What keeps him moving? Like many artists, he can’t really answer that question—nor can I. Still, there are clues to Peters’s humanity that support his active endeavor in art, which are of paramount importance.
In sunny Northern California, a young boy named David lived in the rural land of apricot orchards and plum groves in the Santa Clara Valley. It was an earthy, accessible place, where families threw picnic parties and children cavorted until exhaustion set in, usually just past sundown. In that environment, David played and studied and dreamed, like any other kid. He also mucked about with the many animals that his father brought home, from rabbits and chickens to ducks and ponies. For all the tender vibrations and lively high jinks these treasured pets provided, they came at a necessary cost of routine responsibility. So, the two Peters boys rose early every day, fed the menagerie, cleaned the pens, walked the pony in the paddock, and then, on weekdays, made their way to school.
“We took care of these beautiful animals— all of them, all the time.” Peters fondly recalled. “That was the deal. It was a trip. We learned a lot—by simply doing.”
David Allan Peters, age 6, and his pony, Patches, 1975 in Cupertino, CA.
Later, in junior high school, Peters was encouraged by his art teacher to explore further after demonstrating his great talent with ink washes. His interest in art grew quickly. Then local punk rock skate culture exploded but Peters’s rural roots held equal sway.
“When I got a little older, we started skateboarding, and I made a plywood half pipe in the backyard,” Peters tells me. “We had all these neighborhood kids bouncing around. Imagine this big curvy wooden structure and behind that was the pony watching us skate the day away. It was pretty incredible.” It was also a study in comical contrasts.
Yet it all points to the depth and riches of family and friends, physical fun, looking after one another, and not just living in the moment but enjoying it, preferably outdoors. That was halcyon Cupertino for Peters in the early 1970s and 1980s.
Left: David Allan Peters moves fast and rides high on his custom-painted plywood skateboard across his plywood half pipe, circa 1985, Cupertino, CA. Right: Peters applies a layer of gesso foundation to bare Luan plywood board for a new painting, 2024, Los Angeles, CA.
Soon after, some of the area became the suburban capital of corporate barons, office parks, and think tanks. In that very town, the massive campus matrix of Apple Computers was erected and later replaced by its infinite circular megalith operations center, supplanting a few of the farms and the folks who tended them.
Today, a few hundred miles south in Los Angeles, Peters starts the morning by taking a deep breath and drinking some dark-brew coffee to totally wake up. Then he waters and tends to a family of potted plants that he and his partner, Angela, keep on the patio. It’s a form of “nurturing nature,” he says, something he loves to do between the stations and stages of his service to art. In any mode, Peters is always on the move.
Behind his place are four covered open-air garages, and Peters moves among them with care and precision. He takes the plywood panels he paints upon and sets them flat on tables, variously layering acrylic-bound pigments in wide swaths, stripes, and slithery shapes until they are encrusted an inch high or more above the surface. He’ll often rake through the paint like a farmer in the fields at an early point in his process. It takes eons, it seems, but after many months roll forward and the paint finally dries, the artist draws his grids and patterns on top of the layer-piled panels, later chipping away to their rendered path with a curved linocut knife, unearthing the depths worth diving into—and growing a progeny of new work. It is a remarkable feat, one that Peters performs daily, just like feeding the animals or drying apricots picked fresh from the tree in summer that are later ready for winter enjoyment.
As a small bird lands on a Magnolia tree branch next to his studios, Peters tells me about the demanding but adorable nearby squirrels, raccoons, and possums that he feeds from his hearty animal food budget. “It’s clear I need to get a pet,” he confides and smiles broadly. “That’s another important part of my life: I want to take care of my own goat herd on some property one day. I’d love to rent them out for weed abatement and clear all the scrubby undergrowth from brush fires. Or we’ll make cheese.” He pauses and laughs. “It’s kind of like my artwork. I’ll paint, carve away that paint, and then make paint chip bricks into sculptures— and recycle my pieces down the line. There’s a lot of recycling, renewal, and conservation in my life’s work.”
About a week after I first talked with Peters, I look at a sizeable 5-by-5-feet square piece in his studio. It’s what will soon become Untitled #11—and it’s a doozy.
Layered in trance-inducing vertical bands of juicy primary and secondary colors— and several hues, tints, and shades in between—its face has been combed like a Zen sand garden and pattern-gouged, creating two opposing forms. The first is a broad, winding, fluted, graphic tract that bends three times up against the left and right edges of the picture plane. Then, there are the squared starbursts superimposed across the entire piece in a loose grid. From a few yards away, an optical illusion makes it tricky to determine whether they sit above or below the snaky shape that packs the painting, although, of course, I know the answer. I make a necessary close-nose approach to the piece anyhow—and damn, it’s impressive. Not for its obvious and admirable bright might and obsessive handiwork but for its total package—the inextricable connection between these hallmark elements that instantly tell you it’s a Peters painting. But I can’t stop there. I need to compare.
Process photograph of David Allan Peters’s Untitled #11, 2024, Acrylic on panel, 60 x 60 inches (152.4 x 152. 4 cm).
I walk down the alleyway to another Peters garage studio and look over at Untitled #2, close by, which lies face up on a worktable. It’s like fireworks in motion, sparkling and spinning gracefully, its energetic plumed networks expending otherworldly color-coded energy. As I approach and slowly pass by it, my eyes travel along the trowel-made concentric circles Peters’s carving has revealed. Just before he sets the panel upright, my eyes glide over the surface once more and I ask the artist what he feels every time he chips away at the past in the form of these paint-layer lap lanes.
“It’s liberating,” he says evenly. “But there’s a lot going on in this neighborhood— peculiar street people, lots of traffic and noise sometimes. So, when I’m carving, I have to listen to really loud, fast music. It’s a totally weird thing because I love quiet and calm, but the centralization of that booming sound—and all that action going on in my ears—kind of gives me a certain peace, and I’m able to click right through the carving.”
David Allan Peters, Untitled #2, 2024, Acrylic on panel, 40 x 30 inches (101.6 x 76.2 cm).
I ask Peters what he thinks about most frequently, even when he’s not painting, which amounts to his work at hand. “Even at home, I always think in color. When I think about the aspect of layering paint, I think in color,” he says. “Like, ‘This color will go with this. I want this color on that. I want that color to meet that color.’ I want all of it, even if I can’t always get it.” From what I see, he works diligently—and gets “it” often.
After more discussion with Peters about his technique and process, it turns out that it’s “not necessarily how” that’s important to rendering those color arrangements, “except maybe recently since I’m using larger amounts of paint and thicker layers on bigger panels,” he says. Instead, I suggest that “it’s really about where those colors are revealed.”
Gardener raking sand in a Zen garden, 2018, Kyoto, Japan.
“Oh, I think so—definitely,” Peters says. “Especially when I start carving into it, making those little paint chips, that is the thing I’m thinking about. It’s like, when you think of a mid-twentieth-century American abstract painter or Lucio Fontana cutting into the canvas, right? Those little marks and gouges are—to me—just as important as the big grand gestures that those artists made,” he says. “Cutting out thousands of those little chips is essentially me processing the artwork or putting my final stamp on it. That’s my little mark. That’s what I’ve done. That is me.”
David Allan Peters, Untitled #4, 2024, Acrylic on panel, 40 x 30 inches (101.6 x 76.2 cm).
As I leave Peters’s studio and step out into the high-noon sunshine, I think about two inescapable features that viewers readily see in his work: the cascade of color-riddled forms—rushing, relentless, free—and the gridwork that conveys a sense of stability in the face of chaos. Later, I call Peters and ask him about this.
“Even though the work might seem like it’s all over the place, I really like order,” he tells me. “I feel there’s so much nuttiness in the world. Things are not organized and there’s true turmoil—or whatever you call it—out there and just around the corner. But it’s just that…order—and a little peace—are what I need right now, you know.”
Of course, like Peters, I think we all need that right now.
David Allan Peters at work in one of his four garage studios, 2024, Los Angeles, CA.
Stephen Wozniak is a visual artist, writer, and actor based in Los Angeles, California. His work has been exhibited in the Bradbury Art Museum, the Leo Castelli Gallery and Lincoln Center; read in the Observer, BmoreArt and the Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art; and seen on Star Trek: Enterprise, NCIS: Los Angeles and the Emmy Award-nominated Beyond the Da Vinci Code, among others. He earned a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art and attended Johns Hopkins University. Website: www. stephenwozniakart.com and Instagram: @stephenwozniakart
Process photograph of Untitled #10, 2024, Acrylic on panel, 72 x 60 inches (182.9 x 152.4 cm), David Allan Peter’s shoes and an open padlock.
Untitled #11, 2023
Acrylic on panel
40 x 30 inches
101.6 x 76.2 cm
Untitled #14, 2023
Acrylic on panel
48 x 36 inches
121.9 x 91.4 cm
Untitled #16, 2023
Acrylic on panel
40 x 60 inches
101.6 x 152.4 cm
Untitled #1, 2024
Acrylic on panel
60 x 40 inches
152.4 x 101.6 cm
Untitled #2, 2024
Acrylic on panel
40 x 30 inches
101.6 x 76.2 cm
Untitled #3, 2024
Acrylic on panel
40 x 30 inches
101.6 x 76.2 cm
Untitled #4 2024
Acrylic on panel
40 x 30 inches
101.6 x 76.2 cm
Untitled #5, 2024
Acrylic on panel
60 x 40 inches
152.4 x 101.6 cm
Untitled #10, 2024
Acrylic on panel
72 x 60 inches
182.9 x 152.4 cm
Untitled #11, 2024
Acrylic on panel
60 x 60 inches
152.4 x 152.4 cm
DAVID ALLAN PETERS
Born in 1969 in Cupertino, CA
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
EDUCATION
2001
MFA, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA
1997
BFA, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2024
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
2022
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
2021
Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY
2020
Royale Projects, Los Angeles, CA
2019
Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA
Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
2017
Royale Projects, Los Angeles, CA
2016
Weber Fine Art, Greenwich, CT
Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY
Royale Projects, Palm Desert, CA
AKA PDX, Portland, OR
2015
Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, N
Royale Projects, Palm Desert, CA
2013
Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY
2012
“Super Optic,” Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Oakland, CA 2011 Royale Projects, Palm Desert, CA
“Paintings,” Marc Arrañaga Contemporary Art, New York, NY
2009
“Integrity Spiral,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2007
“Dexterous Aura,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2005
“May The Road Rise With You,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2003
Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2001
“Paintings,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2000
MFA Exhibition, Peggy Phelps Gallery, Claremont, CA
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2022
“Hybrid Spaces” (curated by Dr. Necmi Sönmez), Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, Istanbul,Turkey
2019
“LA Painting,” Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA
Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
2018
“Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
2016
“Hello My Name Is...Los Angeles,” Royale Projects, Los Angeles, CA
2015
“Transcending Cool,” Royale Projects, Palm Desert, CA
2013
“Aftermath Post-Minimal Abstraction,” Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Oakland, CA
“Looking Back at Tomorrow,” Royale Projects, Palm Desert, CA
2012
“Fresh,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
“Auction 2012,” Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
“Letters from Los Angeles,” Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles, CA
“Deep Paint” (curated by Anne Martens and Jayna Zweiman), Hudson | Linc, Los Angeles, CA
2011
“Palette To Palate,” Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA
“Spectrum,” Kellogg Gallery, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA
2010
“Karl Benjamin: Under the Influence,” Royale Projects, Palm Desert, CA
“Strataigraphic,” Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Oakland, CA
“OUTSIDE THE LINES: drawing in contemporary art,” Royale Projects, Palm Desert, CA
2009
“Fresh,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
“Le petite objet,” Royale Projects, Palm Desert, CA
“Surface Tension,” Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Oakland, CA
“White,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2008
“Four Abstract Painters,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2006
“Surface,” Landis Art Center Gallery, Riverside, CA
“Firecrackers: Artists to Watch,” Roshambo Gallery, Healdsburg, CA
“Made in California” (curated by Michelle Deziel), Brea Art Gallery, Brea, CA
2005
“Freefall: Painting in the 00’s,” Contemporary Quarterly Project Space
2004
“The Line Up,” Walter McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA
“Abstract Los Angeles: A Painting Exhibit,” SoHo Myriad, Atlanta, GA
“Process” (curated by Chandra Cerritos), Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, Long Island City, NY
2003
“20th Anniversary Exhibition,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
“Sex in Deep Space” (curated by Marc Arranaga and Chip Tom), City Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
“SOULdiers” (curated by Steve Schmidt), SCA Gallery, Pomona, CA
2002
“California Dreaming” (curated by Albano Morandi), Brescia, Italy
“Marking, Change in an Inconstant World” (curated by Marc Arranaga and Chip Tom), The Advocate Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
“Glamour Trip So Soon To Slip” (curated by Suzanne Bybee), Sheehan Gallery, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA
2001
“Cross-pollination” (curated by Susan Joyce and Mery Lynn McCorckle), Holland Tunnel Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; traveled to Los Angeles Arboretum, Los Angeles, CA
2000
“New American Talent: The 15th Exhibition” (curated by David Pagel), Texas Fine Art Association, The Jones Center for Contemporary Art, Austin, TX; traveled to Shore Art Gallery, Abilene Christian University, Abilene, TX; Texarkana Regional Arts and Humanities Council, Texarkana, TX; Buddy Holly Center, Lubbock, TX; and Del Rio Council for the Arts, Fire House Gallery, Del Rio, TX
“White,” Huntington Beach Art Center, Huntington Beach, CA
“LA ARTCORE Annual Group Show” (curated by Mat Gleason), Los Angeles, CA
1999
“HOME/WORK,” Factory Studios, Los Angeles, CA
College Art Association MFA Exhibition, Barnsdall Art Park, Los Angeles, CA
AWARDS
1994
Nora Bartine Memorial Award, De Anza College, Cupertino, CA
COLLECTIONS
Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, Istanbul, Turkey
Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
Published on the occasion of the exhibition
DAVID ALLAN PETERS
11 July - 23 August 2024
Miles McEnery Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York NY 10011
tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com
Publication © 2024 Miles McEnery Gallery
All rights reserved
Essay © 2024 Stephen Wozniak
Publications and Archival Associate Julia Schlank, New York, NY
Photography by Dan Bradica, New York, NY
Catalogue layout by Spevack Loeb, New York, NY
ISBN: 979-8-3507-3265-8
Cover: Untitled #16, (detail), 2023
