Todd Peterson

Todd Peterson

   644 W 69th Ter, Kansas City, MO, 64113

My art is a prayer; a singular devotion; a deep invocation. I create prints, paintings, and drawings to honor family, friends, and personal heroes. My work is concerned with the intersection between life and memory and how time and chance affect us all.

My pieces are structured around figures such as children, dancers and ballplayers, surrounded by objects that often contain a personal meaning: For example, I consider the birds in my pictures to be not unlike a Greek chorus – commenting on the figures lives, offering encouragement or casting aspersions. I also believe that flight is a great metaphor for change, although in my work it is usually the fish that do the flying. When I was a child, my older sister and I used to hunt for frogs and salamanders. These elusive creatures remain for me a sign not only of youth, but also of the search for one’s identity. There is no singular meaning for any of my pieces – They contain many stories and are more than the sum of their parts. One illustration of this would be the screen print, The Aviary, which was inspired by my father; his childhood hero Ted Williams; and my Great Aunt Clara, whose nursing home contained a large, enclosed bird house.

I create my works painstakingly and as beautifully as I can in order to affirm the lives of those I revere and to give my own meaning. This is especially evident in the graphic work: Screen-printing is at its core a repetitive and ritualistic medium – Before an individual color can be printed a new stencil must be created or additional work done to an existing stencil. I hand paint my stencils without the use of photo- mechanical processes, with each screen print consisting of between 300 and 400 separate color applications, and each single edition of prints taking upwards of a year to complete.