Painting is my way of approaching my emotional psyche, often resulting in sprawling surreal or abstract concepts. What makes engaging the canvas exciting is not knowing what will appear at the other end; it’s a revelatory process. Here is a collection of my work all the way back to high school.
Inbetweens (2011)
Acrylic and Water Color on Canvas
A song that resonated with me during the process was All the Go Inbetweens by Silversun Pickups, so I ended up naming the piece after it. The song makes me feel out at sea, searching for some thing over the horizon. This painting is my dance with that feeling.
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Autumn Enthralls (2017)
Water Color, Pastel Marker, and Pen on Canvas Board
Fall of 2016 changed my life. It was one of the most golden eras of my young existence, living with my two best friends, thriving in school, writing short stories and short films, and exploring the beautiful mountain town of Blacksburg. This painting is that era.
A companion piece to this painting is my poem, “Collocation Meditation” which can be found in the linked poetry collection.
An Easter egg here is the cloaked character at the bottom of the painting. It ended up being the visual inspiration for the character Darron in my short film “A Witch Story“, which I shot the following Spring.
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Venus (2017)
Water Color, Acrylic, and Card Stock on Canvas
An open commission, leaving the project open to whatever I wanted.
The theme was dark and mysterious, eventually twisting into alien territory. The result being an ominous series of hieroglyphic scenes.
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Circles of Limbo (2018) Collaboration with Nora Browning
Acrylic and Water Color on Wood
Duality is the theme here- light and dark, heaven and hell, feathered strokes and scaled layering, breathe out, breathe in.
A collaborative piece with Nora Browning, her half being the octopus and mine being the dragon. The Circles of Limbo represent the balance between the two sides, the yin and the yang.
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Mercury (2018)
Water Color and Pen on Styrofoam Board, Acrylic on Canvas, and Gouache painted paper collage.
I had an image in mind of either looking up at the planet from a red cave or looking down at the reflection in a pool of water.
Ashley Stant and I had a Pollock-esque painting session where we made two chaotic gouache paintings, which I cut up and collaged onto Mercury, which I was working on at the time, bringing a colorful new texture to the otherwise empty image.
The title is Mercury as I felt it similar in style to Venus and could be considered a sister piece. The alternative title is Mercury Heart, as this was a passion project spanning my painting career.
Bonus: I made a song to compliment this painting, check out Mercury Circuit Board
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Koi Pond (2018)
Oil and Gouache on Canvas
A commissioned painting, something abstract and floral, using mostly Earth tones with splashes of color.
That Summer, I was spending a lot of time at Virginia Tech’s Hahn Horticulture Garden, which houses a bustling koi pond. I often found myself taking pictures of the beautiful creatures gliding under the water’s surface on sunny afternoons. This became the inspiration to the piece.
Also, this was my first ever Oil Painting, a medium which I fell in love with from the point forward.
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Sure Would (2018)
Oil, Water Color, Wax, and Wallpaper on Canvas
At the end of my 23rd Summer of 2018, I left my home state of Virginia to venture into the unknown horizon of adulthood in Georgia. I left my home in Blacksburg, affectionately named Sure Would (a play on the street name Sherwood) after an emotional move out week. There was a moment that shook me, when the screen veil was removed from the kitchen window after two years and sunlight poured in through the glass. I was speechless.
This painting was a goodbye letter the 5 years of my college life and I wanted to represent that with an emotional weight and emphasize the passing of time. Rain or shine, night or day, something was happening at the Sure Would Temple, deep within the Blue Ridge Mountains.
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Thank you for viewing this journey and look forward to seeing more paintings in the future!
Peter Volpone 