Born in New York City, Peter Holbrook earned a BA Degree from Dartmouth
College and studied at the Brooklyn Museum with Reuben Tam. He taught
at the University of Chicago and from 1970 to 1971 at the University of
California at Hayward. Working from his northern California
studio in Redway, he paints from photographs he takes on
location. He has painted throughout California and the Southwest
including Canyon de Chelly in Arizona.
PETER HOLBROOK
Known as one of the foremost painters of the canyons of the Southwest,
Peter Holbrook has a unique and unusual method of painting. He portrays
light and form with subtle and intricate patterns of color, combining
the quality of abstraction with the image of reality. Photography is the
source, which Holbrook uses, and he insists that it is just as
important that he be an accomplished photographer as well as a painter.
Combining the elements of a series of photographs, and using his own
keen sense of natural light and space, Peter creates his own painterly
reality to represent the beauty and true vision of the natural
environment.Although his paintings appear to be photo-realistic from a
distance, at close range the viewer can see that the canvas is filled
with loose impressionistic strokes of color.
EDUCATION
1961 BA Degree, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
1962-63 Brooklyn Museum School of Art, Brooklyn, NY
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
1988 Center for the Arts and Humanities, Sun Valley, ID
1970-71 California State University, Hayward, CA
1968 North Shore Art League, Winnetka, IL
1968-70 University of Illinois, Chicago, IL
1968 Oxbow Summer School of Painting, Saugatuck, MI
1962-63 Fort Hamilton Army Base Brooklyn, NY
Museum Exhibitions (Group)
2000 "Images of Water" 14th Annual Photography Competition & Exhibition, Eureka City Hall, Eureka, CA
2000 "Ten Painters" M. Graves Museum of Art, Eureka, CA
1999 "Green Woods and Crystal Waters: The American Landscape Tradition Since 1950," Philbrook Museum of Art
1997 "Canyon Walls!" Foothills Art Center, Golden, CO
1994 "Grand Canyon Exhibition", N.A.U. Art Museum, Flagstaff, AZ
1994 "Fish out of Water", Mesa Southwest Museum, Mesa, AZ
1994 "Visual Treasures of the Living Gorge" Hunter Art Museum, Chattanooga, TN
1990 "The Big Picture" Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA
1987 "Close Focus" National Museum of Art, Washington, DC
1987 "Mainstream America: The Collection of Philip Desind" Butler Institute, Youngstown, OH
1987 "Capturing the Canyon", Mesa Southwest Museum, Mesa, AZ
1986 "Watercolor USA 1986, The Monumental Image", Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO
1985 "American Realism, The Janss Collection", San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
1965 "Twelve Chicago Painters", Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
Indiana State University, Indianapolis, IN
National Collection of Fine Arts, (Smithsonian) Washington, D.C.
Northern Illinois University, De Kalb, IL
Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Cornell College, Mount Vernon, IA
Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ
Museum of the Southwest, Midland, TX
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE
Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID
Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO
Achenbach Collection, Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA
Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA.
The Dunnegan Gallery of Art, Bolivar, MO
Bibliography
2000 "Painting the American West", Donald Hagerty, Southwest Art magazine, February
1999 The Artist's Illustrated Encyclopedia: Terms. Techniques, and Materials.
Phil Metzger, North Light Books
1998 "The Aesthetics of Presence: The Landscape Paintings of Peter Holbrook"
Katharine Tehranian, PROSPECTS: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA
1998 The Artist and the American Landscape, Driscoll and Skolnick, First Glance
Books Cobb, CA
1998 Majesty of the Grand Canyon: 150 Years in Art. Kinsey and Skolnick, First Glance Books, Cobb, CA
1997 An American Landscape Collection. Wm. Struve. Zurick Zurick Distributors Inc. Chicago, IL
1997 Leading the West: One Hundred Contemporary Painters and Sculptors.
Donald Hagerty, Northland Publishing, Flagstaff, AZ
1996 "Nature's art unadorned", Bill Jones, Arizona Republic, Phoenix, AZ, August 1
1996 Peter Holbrook: Paintings A Catalog of the Touring Exhibition
1996-1997.Platypus Press, Garberville, CA
1996 Canyon de Chelly. 100 Years of Painting and Photography. Donald Hagerty, Gibbs-Smith Publisher, Salt Lake City, UT
1993 Enliven Your Paintings With Light. Phil Metzger. North Light Books
1992 "Peter Holbrook, The Living Landscape", The World and I magazine, June 1992
1990 "The Lure of The Golden State", Kathy Neal, U.S. ART Magazine, October 1990
1989 The American Painting Collection of the Sheldon Menorial Art Gallery. Geske and Jahovy, U. of Nebraska Press
1989 Spirit of Place. John Arthur, Bullfinch Press, 1989
1984 "Peter Holbrook". American Artist. March 1984
1983 "Ten Contemporary Painters" American Artist, Feb. 1983--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Grottos Trail offers one of
the more otherworldly Aspen experiences. Its trailhead starts on
Independence Pass—aka Highway 82—about 9 miles east of town, and winds
with easy-to-moderate difficulty up through the pine-heavy White River
National Forest along the Roaring Fork River. You come for the grottos,
of course—caves of rock by turns undulant and jagged, worn and bowed and
hacked by fitful river currents. You can get down into them, worth
doing in order to see the formations from the inside (go in winter or
spring to see why locals nicknamed them "ice caves"). Lesser-skilled
hikers should use caution, though, especially when climbing back out—the
rocks can be slippery.
Back on the trail, keep going to reach the
cascades, a ribboned set of waterfalls that streak through the restless
rock gullies. And back on Highway 82, keep going to reach Independence,
a settlement abandoned to ghosts back in 1879.