Peter Larson

Eros Mango

As an undergraduate, I studied cultural anthropology, studio art and also have a graduate degree in counseling. Throughout my twenty-five career as a practicing psychotherapist and student affairs administrator, I have continued to take studio and art history courses as a personal interest and avocation.

During the last three years, I have taken a number of painting workshops entitled “Awakening the Creative: The Painting Experience” with Stewart Cubley. These workshops have had the most influence on my creative development to date, in terms of exposing me to a completely different approach to painting. Instead of focusing on technical skill, formal issues or the specific development of preconceived images, these studios have helped me focus on the “process” of painting itself. The results of this kind of approach are very spontaneous works that are often reminiscent of an “automatic” painting style (i.e. spiritualist, non-objective and non-referential). The images that have emerged through this process have been much more abstract than my previous paintings and on many occasions embody a variety of universal themes and iconography.

The Painting Experience has inspired me to paint from a very deep, intuitive, creative, in-the-moment spontaneity. I have also found when utilizing this approach that I can elicit a wider range of emotional responses from my audience, a greater variety of symbolic source material and often times a state of meditative contemplation…a transcendent sense of being “in the flow” as the painting seems to paint itself. This approach has also provided a safe context in which to confront and work through my own conditioning about what constitutes art making. This method of painting has also helped diminish many of my own creative blocks, fears of criticism and aesthetic self-judgments.

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