Visual myths built from decay, memory, and repair.

John Peterson is a mixed media artist based in Los Angeles, California. He trained at the Art Institute of Southern California and went on to study in the MFA program at Claremont Graduate School of Art.

His paintings sit at the threshold between life and dissolution — memory and myth, presence and absence. Working through painting, collage, found materials, and built-up surfaces, he treats decay not as simple decline but as a transformative condition, one through which beauty and meaning can still emerge.

"The surfaces I build hold visible histories — the material language of the work mirrors the emotional realities that shape it."

He is drawn to the physical evidence of time: abrasion, fracture, repair, accumulation, erosion. These marks work on two levels at once, formal and conceptual, reflecting a human effort to understand impermanence and locate meaning inside change.

Folklore and ancestral memory sit at the center of his practice. Deer, elk, and other animal forms recur throughout his work as messengers — figures suggesting communication across the boundary between the living and the dead, the material and the immaterial. Read this way, each painting becomes part of a larger visual myth, shaped by grief, reverence, and a wish to recover the sense of wonder that daily life tends to bury.