Artist Statement

Peter Dougherty is a New York based artist whose work examines the role of biology in religion and mystical experience. Through painting, he explores the intersection between myth and the biology of the human body, and how both the canvas and the body are a battleground of sensation and intention dueling to create a dynamic and reactive self image that pushes the edge of the energetic and material, the ethereal and the visceral. By including principles of growth into the formation of composition, and by hi-lighting the overlapping visual qualities of plant and animal morphology through abstraction, he explores the behavior and commonality of organic matter.