Nick Peterson

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Nick is a self-taught linocut printmaker currently working and living in Toronto, Canada. Since 2021 he has appeared in juried exhibitions hosted by various Canadian arts organizations including Workman Arts, The Ontario Society of Arts, and the Orillia Museum of Art and History while regularly appearing at Toronto-based arts markets and fairs. Inspired by printmakers past such as William S. Rice alongside other artists like Eyvind Earle, Nick’s linocuts are based on the world around him: trees outside the window, the seasons of the year, or the knick-knacks on his shelves. Using a combination of monoprint and reduction techniques, Nick strives to capture the fleeting, transient, nature of his subject matter.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

The practice of linocut reflects the processes of perceiving life’s many, and sometimes disparate, elements. All things have layers, and each layer has shapes and colours which work together to create a final form. Life and linocut are puzzles whose pieces, individual and as a whole, invite appreciation and interrogation. Working in linocut allows a person to see these layers and chose their scale or prominence in specific and meditative ways.

$1,070.00

Linocut print (framed).

25x31"

Limited edition 1 of 1.

Nature was once the only power in human imagination capable of lifting the cultural weight of our existential questions. Hoisted onto trees, oceans, and animals were questions about who we are, why we’re here, and what our place in the universe really is. To examine our shift away from this thinking, I took the Norse World Tree, Yggdrasil, a mythic structure that held people’s entire cosmological framework, and laid it bare. Through reduction linocut I aimed to demonstrate that Western civilization has forgotten how to cultivate cultural imagination and creation, and that we are poorer for it. We have minimized the tree, old and giant, into a mere source of wood.

Nick Peterson

$625.00

Linocut print (framed).

23x17"

Limited edition 1 of 1.

A combination of monoprint and relief printing, this landscape is a technical experiment that aimed to capture the blur of clouds, the occlusion of the horizon, and the sporadic tree line of a frozen lake in Dalarna, Sweden. Dalarna, formerly Dalecaria, is the home to famous Dalecarian (or Dala) Horse, a small folk toy carved from pine that’s been around since the 1600s but gained international notoriety at the 1937 and 1939 World’s Fairs. This landscape means to feature the place where a dala horse’s wood is farmed and carved, itself a metaphor for our understanding on wider production chains. As we hold a toy in our hands, its origins and provenance are blurred from us. Wood is a product, a tree pulled from its ecosystem and processed by logging and lathing. The steps between the tree and the horse are myriad, and not always clear.

Nick Peterson