05 Mar ARTIST SPOTLIGHTS: PETER CAMPBELL

Thank the arrival of the digital age for impelling Peter Campbell to become a hands-on expert in oil paintings that portray the grandeur of Western landscapes, most of them crowned by glorious sunrise or sunset skies. “I’m old school, a tinkerer, all about tactile experience,” he explains of his approach.

Campbell first became aware of art growing up in Wilmington, Delaware. “My mom took us to museums,” he recalls of his early fondness for two painters of dramatically different styles who, nonetheless, both evoked powerful emotional responses: Andrew Wyeth, known for his magically Realist scenes of New England and Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley; and Jackson Pollock, whose often large-scale Abstract Expressionist “drip paintings” had the power to evoke the chaotic energy of the modern world.

Campbell’s first creative outlet, however, came through another medium when, after moving to Charlotte, North Carolina, he had the good fortune to study at Myers Park High School with photographer Byron Baldwin, who had set up a professional-level program. “In 12th grade, the class was two periods long, and you had to do a Friday photo and critiques. It was what turned me into an artist.”

Baldwin pointed Campbell toward the Savannah College of Art and Design, which offered him a scholarship. While there, he remembers, “I also started hanging out with the painters and would go to the figure drawing classes.” After graduating, he moved to Asheville, North Carolina, to work for a photographer and began painting on location occasionally in his spare time.

A 1995 visit to his brother in Durango, Colorado, literally changed Campbell’s perspective. “I thought, well, this is why I can’t paint. I need to be painting out here.” He soon moved there, supporting himself through photography while painting as often as possible. “And I came up with a specific goal: to be done shooting pictures when digital took over, because I did not want to sit in front of a computer.” That day arrived around the turn of the millennium, when Campbell sold all his photo equipment “for pennies on the dollar” and launched his fine art career. “At one of our reunions, I told Byron Baldwin, ‘Well, I finally chose the smallest town in the most remote place to do the dumbest thing.’”

Summer Afternoon | Oil on Canvas | 50 x 40 inches | 2022

In fact, the decision proved to be a smart one, as Campbell gradually amassed a body of work informed by a darkroom photographer’s eye and expressed through the hands-on skills of a well-educated, diligently self-trained painter. There is nothing routine about his approach. “I experimented for years with learning how. There’s a million ways to get a painting where you want it.” Sometimes he works in plein-air; other times, he starts on location and completes work back in the studio. Or he’ll start with a photo reference — though it must be black and white. “Color photography has no information whatsoever. The darks are blocked up and the lights are washed out. I can paint more from a black and white, which gives you every tonality you could want.”

Summer Clouds | Oil on Canvas | 16 x 20 inches | 2023

Campbell is represented by McLarry Fine Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico; A. Banks Gallery in Bozeman, Montana; Ann Korologos Gallery in Basalt, Colorado, where he’ll have a show in early August; T.H. Brennen Fine Art in Scottsdale, Arizona; and Horizon Fine Art Gallery in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Based in Marin County, California, Norman Kolpas is the author of more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. He also teaches nonfiction writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.