They would come to the show and then turn around and leave, completely offended. “
Peterson was still in his teens when he attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Myrtle Avenue was a pretty dark place—Peterson recalled earlier seeing a man sitting in a car with his head blown off—but the darkness resonated with something deep inside.
“It was about a decade in the making,” Peterson said. “Every day, just buying drugs, doing drugs, experiencing that social isolation, that otherness, being completely outside of normal social boundaries, witnessing the craziness that was going on – the deviance, the violence.”
In one of several attempts to clean up and start over, Peterson sent his Polaroid creations to Tod Swank — a professional skateboarder turned dealer — and quickly became one of the most popular illustrators in the industry, creating iconic graphics for companies like Pig Wheels, Zero Skateboards, and Foundation. After arriving in Southern California, both Peterson and his brother were immersed in the skateboarding counterculture, with Peterson meeting a variety of people, including long-time champion Shepard Fairey. But Leiter’s Siren Song was strong, and despite Peterson’s best efforts, he couldn’t keep it clean. Peterson was in and out of rehab, the hospital, and ultimately jailed. When he comes out, he needs work. Fairey needed a designer for his monograph Obedience: Supply and Demand, The Art of Shepard Fairey.
Thus began a decade-long partnership with Fairey’s design agency, Studio Number One (the Los Angeles Library has just released a limited-edition library card he created in collaboration with Fairey). Through it all, Peterson continued to refine and expand his own distinctive view of the world, often waking up at 4 a.m. to paint for hours before arriving at Fairey’s studio, where he worked until 6 p.m.
The long days took their toll, but slowly, the rest of the world began to take notice. “At first, people seemed scared,” Peterson recalled. “They would come to the show and then turn around and leave, completely offended.”
In an art world often driven by purely aesthetic appeals, the cognitive dissonance of Peterson’s reality may be unbearable. Online, critics responded with dismissive vitriol—sometimes denouncing Peterson for exploiting female figures—rather than examining the ethical, moral and historical questions he raised.
Over the past few years, however, Peterson’s work has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Striking and tragic, these paintings seem to stand out from the headlines and even resonate with those who may have turned away.
Peterson remembers one particular moment when he felt the shift most vividly. It was 2014, as Russia prepared to annex Crimea, and Peterson was invited to participate in the Katowice Street Art Festival in Poland. While painting the mural—always a nerve-wracking situation since his subject matter rarely received a warm welcome from local homeowners—he was greeted by several elderly Polish men in the neighborhood—people who, according to Peterson, were justified in rejecting street art simply because it altered the traditional sensibilities of their community. But they love the job because it speaks to them.
The New York Times offered a similar opportunity to nearly 500,000 readers last year when America’s newspaper of record requested two articles – one published after the police shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina; Another was printed alongside Gregory Orr’s column “Mississippi Memory,” marking not only a wider acceptance of Peterson’s work but also a growing understanding of his own worldview.
“It was really validating,” said Peterson, who received two more requests last month, “to have people you respect request your work and engage with the broader culture in an uncompromising way.”
But it’s not always easy.
Last year, before the November attacks in Paris, Peterson was invited by JR’s 99prints to travel to France to create custom stone lithographs using vintage printing presses once used by Picasso, Miró and Chagall. It was a grueling and grueling process, and the events that occurred were mentally distressing. The release of the print – titled The Somber Scene, as expected – has been respectfully postponed. But when the curator of an exhibition Peterson was scheduled to stage in Paris asked him to abandon the violent imagery, Peterson chose to cancel the show.
“There’s no better time to address these issues than while they’re happening,” Peterson said with visible frustration. The show is titled “The Trial,” but it opened in Belgium and centers on an ominous, gleaming sculpture of a life-size warrior holding a severed head.
Before the opening, Peterson appeared on the front page of Antwerp daily De Standaard, speaking openly about fear, terrorism and the role of art, particularly a favorite: William Turner’s “The Slave Ship.”
“Works like ‘The Slave Ship,’ Picasso’s ‘Guernica,’ Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment,’ ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’…” Peterson mused. “These works express internal crises or mark difficult times in a collective culture, and they force people to confront the reality of the world they live in. And, I think that’s the highest path for art.”
Shortly after the Judgment, Brussels was attacked by three suicide bombers.
Religious and cultural fervor has become a major theme in Peterson’s exhibition titled “Purity,” which opened in Hong Kong in January. Easily Peterson’s most ambitious exhibition to date, it is an immersive masterpiece composed of twenty large-scale paintings inspired by Renaissance religious works. But despite the chaotic nature of their muse—violence, conflict, destruction, and, in our case, our lawless lady—the works in Purity remind us less of Caravaggio’s bloodthirsty beheadings and more of Goya’s unblinking observation.
“My mission is not to change the world,” Peterson is careful to point out. “Actually, I don’t really like do-gooders…I just paint what I see.”
This is a fact we cannot forget.
This year, in between playing with his three children, Peterson is preparing for exhibitions in New York and Paris, and most importantly, Into the Sun at Diesel Art Gallery in Tokyo. *
This article originally appeared in High Fructose Issue 40, which is now sold out. Support our publications and get our latest issue with a new subscription here!
