Peter Kitchell Biography

Life on the East Coast centers on a home and studio complex where he lives and works with his wife, Gayle Kabaker, an accomplished illustrator. They have a daughter, Sonya (a singer and musician with her own career) and son, Max, in high school.

In the early 90's, Peter joined with local arts activists to found Partnership for the Arts in Western Massachusetts and the Artbank, an educational and performance facility. This led to a grant sponsoring Peter in a lecture series, "Twice Seen".

The idea of the lecture being, that his many media and the visions they illuminate, were all perceived with the same inner eye. Whether through a lens or a brush his vision organized the world in the same way. Comparing photographs and abstract paintings from very different times and places over a twenty-year period, the similarities, as one might expect, were astonishing. This project evolved into the book you see elsewhere on the site. The process of assembling random parts into images became more organic. This eventually led to a process of assembling images into collages that form the main body of his current work.

Peter continues to paint background textures in the studio to collage in with the photography. Traveling he continues to paint outdoors in watercolor. Thirty years of wandering have taken him through ancient mud cities of Saharan Africa, to Pagan churches in the remoter parts of

Scandinavia, or to farms high on the volcanoes of Central America and Mayan temples in the dry heat of the Yucatan. More recently there have been extended trips to ruins in Tuscany, and the temples of central India and Japan.