About Joshua Peterson

I grew up in Kentucky with my parents, brother and three sisters. We were all homeschooled, and I would get up very early in the winter time to light the fireplace and warm the house. Once the fire was going I would turn the tv onto PBS KET, the only station we received, and start working on my math. One day while I was doing math, a strange looking fellow came on KET and started painting a seascape. At that time I had no respect whatsoever for artists, and mostly relegated them to the arena of liberal, head-in-the-clouds types. I began watching with contempt as the artist placed a piece of tape across the canvas and painted the top half blue. I was just waiting for him to start doing some stupid abstract shape, and was not long to wait, when to the field of blue he began adding swirls of white. I watched. Then, with a sudden whir of his brush, the swirls became clouds. Not abstract things a bad painter calls clouds, but the type of thing any idiot could look at and say "That, sir, is a cloud." I sat bolt up right and turned up the volume. The man was talking in a soft voice about his "Happy little clouds" which I found weird, and partially confirming to my bias about artists; but one could not deny, what he had done was GOOD. Once the sky was finished, I thought the painting perhaps the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I was concerned that he was going to ruin it in the minutes to follow. He stripped off the tape, and said the darkness below was water. I scoffed. It was just the black color of the canvas he had started with. He went into some light paint, and what at first was a light line on the darkness became the ocean. I was hooked. I was mesmerized. I could not take my eyes away. I watched as he brought the water all the way to the foreground, and then paint the most gorgeous breaking wave on the beach.

After the bliss that was my first viewing of "Joy of Painting" ended, I resolved to be up and ready with a blank VHS cassette every morning there after to record the shows. I asked my mom to let me use the craft paints she had, and she agreed. I started with acrylics, but found them wanting and soon moved on to oils which I found much more suitable to the prima facia style I was learning watching Bob Ross.

I took enormous delight in painting scenes from around Kentucky. I would watch out the car window and try to pick out the colors in any given thing. Clouds, trees, reflections, snow. Storing it away in my memory for the time I could try to paint it.

At 19 I joined the navy, as I had always known I would, and became a deep sea diver. I expected that diving would be difficult What I did not expect was how the military would take all the magic out of my life. As a youth, I had always enjoyed reading fantasy, writing poetry, painting, drawing. After I had joined, I found I lost interest in these. Not that I had found other interests, but rather that the whole world just seemed dulled. I no longer had the yearning to create. I don't know if it was stress, the new environment, or what. but I didn't have the drive I needed for imagination. I painted every now and again, but only to the tune of three or so poorly done paintings over the course of about 10 years.

This dry spell ended in 2018 when I decided to do a painting for my wife of a scene I had loved of the Hawaiian mountains. We had visited Ka'ena point many times, and I decided to try and paint her a 36x48 of those mountains. I had never painted from a reference before, and the improvement in my quality was incredible. I began painting in earnest and a friend of mine, who owned a gallery, asked me if I could make some for him to place in his gallery. The rest is history.

I hope you like what you see here. Everything I display in my gallery is hand painted by me.

I hope you will enjoy.