Cleon Peterson

The sort of work produced by the hand of Cleon Peterson raises many questions about violence—most importantly, who, or what, is causing it.

His artworks are rampant with murder, brutality and all the wrongdoings imagined in today’s almost-real Orwellian future.

Upon looking at his pieces, filled with shadowy figures and sinister scenes, viewers may acknowledge some close ties with the present reality. There’s an omnipresent fear encircling our world, and Peterson is painting its many faces.

The artist spent most of his youth in constant fear. He suffered from chronic asthma attacks and was considered one of the ten sickest kids with respiratory disease in the state of Washington. He was admitted to the children’s hospital so frequently that the staff would let him enter the emergency room without proper check-ins. To help ease the anxiety and stress of his condition, he took to drawing violent battle scenes that stemmed from his fascination with WWII and James Bond movies. “I didn’t know if I was going to be alive forever because I was so sick,” he says. “So the way I saw art was like, you could make something, and then it would be around after you.”

Peterson’s obsession with art only grew throughout middle school. Instead of drawing, he imagined new apocalyptic scenes onto paintings. At 15 years old, he produced 50 pieces for his first show at a Unitarian church down the street from his house. The artist says that the solo exhibition was a huge success and local newspapers were even writing about him. “I was a total failure at school, but I could make art,” he says. “So I kind of looked at art as the only thing I was actually going to be able to do. It was the only thing I was getting any kind of positive feedback from.”

Peterson continues to be a master of telling dystopian stories through his bold paintings. The Seattle-born artist’s compositions are predominantly black and white with splashes of blood red to represent acts of war, terror and killings. With this signature color palette, he explores the various aspects of man’s unpredictable

behavior, the dark side of the human consciousness and global crises. One of his most recent exhibitions, “Stare Into The Sun” at Pilevneli Gallery in Istanbul, sheds light on climate change through various landscape paintings. With these new works, he emphasizes mankind’s destruction of nature at an unprecedented rate; humans are threatening the survival of a million species, as well as their own future.

Classical art forms also inform Peterson’s bold figures, reminiscent of those created by the ancient Greeks. The artist champions this figurative resemblance to show how history and violence never seem to progress. Instead, the concept of a righteous world seemingly remains an impossible reality. Still, Peterson attempts to speak up on these issues with every piece he creates instead of remaining silent.

We talked to Cleon Peterson about his obsession with art at an early age, being a social outcast and the history of violence within his paintings.

were wearing flippers, so I wouldn’t have to draw thefeet. It was kind of like a cheat for me.

What kind of art interested you as a kid? I was into painting and learned a lot from people that were creative in various fields. One of my babysitters was a filmmaker. She made this new wave punk film in Seattle with stop-motion animation type of stuff. I also hung out with this guy named Jacob Lawrence, who was the head of the painting department at the University of Washington. He was a great painter. I was constantly surrounded by people that were doing cool stuff around me.

I was also really sick as a kid. Whenever I wasn’t able to go to school, I would be drawing and making art at the hospital.

What kind of pieces did you draw? I liked to draw battle scenes. My friend Andy and I were really fascinated with World War II and James Bond. Weird fact, but I couldn’t draw faces, hands and feet. You remember that scene in one of the James Bond movies where they were all fighting underwater with spears and stuff? I drew that a lot because they had masks on and

Let’s talk about your signature characters, who do they represent? Did they evolve over time? After I had been making art for a while, I got into trouble with drugs and became really messed up for 10 years. I was a social outcast living in my car in San Diego. I always had this feeling that I wasn’t part of society, but when you’re living on the margins, you feel almost stigmatized, like you’re not part of the world. So at first when I started painting the characters that I’m known for now, I was painting scenarios that I’d encountered. Whether it’s with my personal experiences with police officers or with social deviants like myself—people that were drug addicts or thieves.

When did you start to paint about global issues beyond personal experiences? It was during post-9/11 when everything was going on in Afghanistan. We were fighting these endless wars, seeing the refugee situations and the United States was demonizing Muslim—creating this sense of “otherness.” I started seeing that violence and apathy that we have in the United States toward the actual role that we play

“I LIKE THE

IDEA OF THE VIOLENCE IN NATURE,

BECAUSE IT’S THE NEW THING

THAT WE'RE CONFRONTING

TODAY.”

in the world. I started making paintings about violencethat was going on across the globe. Societal violence.

Tell us about the scale and violence in your paintings. What scenarios are you portraying? I like two different scenarios. Seeing it on a big scale, where there’s a lot of stuff going on and a lot of things to look at. It’s almost like a Peter Bruegel painting, where there’s all kinds of weird little situations happening in the painting that you can pay attention to, but on a global level.

And then I also like to show how grotesque certain situations in the world are with small pieces that portray two or three subjects. Those are more structured and more about gesture and power within the actual composition itself. It’s all about showing power, then victimization and then form. I went to school for design, so I studied a lot of compositional stuff. I’m really aware of just the way a curve has an emotional value or like the way light and dark work in a composition.

Let’s talk about your color palette of black, redand white. Why do you choose to paint using onlythose colors?

Now more than ever? It’s an unfortunate thing, but say if I’m painting a dystopian work, it’s not because I’m focusing on that. I’m highlighting the negatives in the world because I think that people need to be aware of them instead of just being kind of anesthetized to what’s really going on. For me, I feel like I’m capturing a form of reality that’s not spoken about as much as it is in comparison to what I see.

Are you trying to introduce some sort of “call to action” in any of these works? I don’t implicitly try to make work that’s about going out and doing things or call to action. I think, if anything, it would be like showing a reality and then having people look within themselves to kind of figure out how they’re acting in the world. Do you know what I mean?

They have a history. The colors black, red and white have a historic presence in authoritarianism, especially. They also just have a general mood that you can see. For me, I use a palette that’s white, a kind of neutral color that’s a natural canvas color and then a black, that’s very kind of classical and dark to evoke evil in that sense. And then the red to portray evil in another sense. Mostly I’m connecting the emotional feeling of the color itself.

Whenever I do really colorful stuff now, it’s hard for me to get the form right in the composition. And it’s also hard for me to get the mood right in a composition because it ends up feeling like a birthday party or something like that instead of a serious kind of painting.

Would you say you’re nihilistic? I don’t think so, but in a way, I’m cynical. I think I’ve had enough life experiences to know that the deck is stacked, kind of. I feel like I try not to let that overwhelm me in my daily thoughts, but that’s my natural inclination. It might be because I’m looking for those things, but that is how I see the world. I think a lot of people can identify with that right now, especially in this current political climate.

So what sort of themes are you looking into now in your current work? I’ve been making a couple of landscape paintings, actually. And they’re about the sublime, this idea of nature and disaster. I like the idea of the violence in nature because it’s kind of the new thing that we’re confronting today. We’re almost dealing with an apocalypse situation that’s scientifically verified. Like a spiritual and scientific crisis all at the same time. All my work has been about people and violence between people before. But, because we’re in this crisis now with the environment, I think it’s a different kind of thing, man versus nature.

What does your family think about your paintings? Well, I think my kids can deal with more than they’re given respect for generally. And it’s good to expose kids to what’s going on in the world and let them have their own opinions about it. So they see all the work that I do, and it’s great because we get to have a dialogue about what’s going on. I think it’s a way of being involved in what’s going on in the world. I’m open to it. So I think that the more art and different perspectives of the world that I can share with the kids, the better. Regardless of whether it’s an aesthetic or something truly violent. These are the stories we tell, you know what I mean?