Peter Buwalda, B.F.A.

Peter Buwalda is a professional artist living outside Boulder, Colorado with his wife Kimberly. Peter's work has been collected privately and publicly worldwide.

After graduating with distinction from the Alberta University of the Arts, in Calgary Alberta, Canada in 1999, Peter has been developing his unique style of painting with lightfast, archival acrylic ink on stretched watercolor paper for 25 years. Using a blend of wet and dry mark making techniques, his approach juxtaposes control with chaos to imbue expressive emotion and life.

Peter's strong passion for documenting the natural world is evident across his body of work, from the rugged mountain landscapes of Colorado to the vast deserts and open spaces of the American West. Certainly one can see this with his tree paintings. With each twisted branch, knotted root or budding leaf, Peter's trees transcends the mundane. His trees are more than simply icons of the landscape, they evoke the strength of the human condition and represent hope and perseverance. Viewers are connected personally to Peter's trees and the emotional stories told through the primordial wisdom of his subjects. These stories echo the majesty, hardship and fortune of our own lives, through will or by chance.

A drawing major by degree, Peter is driven by an unwavering pursuit of line. He regularly sketches in the field, distilling the essence of his subjects on location -filtering the visual data before him until he finds the language of the thing he is looking at. These field sketches, rich with that hard-won understanding, become the foundation of his studio practice. Back in the studio, Peter works from his sketches in conjunction with photographs and video captured on site to compose his larger paintings. Every painting begins with a thorough under-drawing, allowing him to refine the composition until it achieves the precision and energy he envisions before a single wash of ink is applied.

Peter's deep knowledge of the natural world, particularly plants and trees, further drives and informs his passion. This botanical understanding lends an authenticity and specificity to his work that, combined with his distinctive mark-making techniques, results in a style that is uniquely his own: one that is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to replicate.