Biography

Peter A. (P.A.) Nisbet (Born 1948) is active/lives in New Mexico, Arizona, North Carolina. Peter Nisbet is known for Landscape, skyscape and coastal views painting.

A painter of stark, expansive vistas with subtle qualities of depth and light, Peter Nisbet works from his studio near the bustle of Canyon Road in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the same building occupied by John Sloan in the 1920s.

He graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with a degree in history and then received a commission in the United States Navy, which included ten months in Vietnam.

He began painting as a youngster and continued in the Navy, where he did a ship's portrait that got him enough attention that he was made Director of Art Services for the Navy's Office of Information. Completing his Navy duty in 1974, he worked in Washington DC for a graphic arts firm and then founded his own freelance commercial-art business, which was quite successful.

However, in 1974, a trip through the Sonoran Desert made him realize that he wanted to focus on its austere beauty because it reminded him of the vastness of the ocean he loved so much. He moved to Phoenix, Arizona in 1980, and in 1985 to Santa Fe, New Mexico. But he returns often to Arizona, spending weeks painting and exploring barely accessible areas with his four-wheel-drive vehicle.

He is one of the few artists who has ventured into Antarctica, having received a grant in 1995 to participate in the National Science Foundation's Antarctica Artists and Writers Program. For several months, he worked out of McMurdo Station on the edge of the Ross Sea and was much taken with the natural beauty, strong light, and vast distances of that area. He returned with forty paintings, and one of them was used on the jacket of the novel "Antarctica" by Kim Stanley Robinson. He also paints the Grand Canyon and other dramatic scenes along the Colorado River.

Basically self taught, he credits English painter James M. W. Turner as his primary influence. Before he starts to sketch, he walks the landscape for at least an hour to get a sense of the place and then paints small canvas sketches from which he makes larger studio paintings. He is committed to conveying a sense of the spiritual in his work, a sense of that which he finds overwhelmingly amazing.


Sources include:AskArt
Donald Hagerty, "In Search of the Spiritual", Southwest Art, February 1999
Myrna Zanetell, "Lure of the Landscape", Art of the West, January 2007