Peter Cunis

Currently living in Colorado.


Medium/techniques:
Drawing, painting (oil, alkyd and acrylic), wood burning (pyrography), ceramics, sculpture (assemblage, found object), collage.

Artist Statement: “You have a unique personal vision”, was the reaction I got from a curator at an established Soho art gallery on West Broadway in New York City years back. He added, “Unfortunately, it’s not what our client base buys here”. It made sense. The day I was there, for their walk-in artwork/portfolio reviews, on the walls there were hanging very large photo-realistic oil paintings of horses. I thanked him for his suggestions and recommendations to take my work to some places in Greenwich Village.

I like it when people are viewing my work and someone says, “I’ve never seen anything like this”. It’s both bad and good. Bad in the way that it might not directly connect with a movement, genre or artist. It doesn’t look like anything else out there. It’s good in the way that it might be considered idiosyncratic, perhaps unconventional; something new that might be referencing historical aspects, or not.

I’m going for permanence and durability. From ceramic and metal to pyrography (wood burning) to paintings with or without gold leaf to assemblage...

School of Visual Arts, New York City received a Bachelor of Fine Arts-BFA, Media Arts/Illustration 1986.
I'm fortunate to have met people kind enough to help me to refine my work. I am grateful for all of the opportunities I've had because of them. During grade school commercial artist Mel Crawford, in high school imaginative realism artist Michael Whelan, while attending the School of Visual Arts, NYC instructors Frances Jetter, Marshall Arisman and Matt Mahurin. During SVA and afterwards, I was an apprentice/assistant for performance artist Robert Delford Brown in NYC. While living in Hoboken, I worked for artist Tim Daly who taught me the screen printing process.

Collections -
- Museum of Death in Hollywood, California
- The Punk Rock Museum, Las Vegas, Nevada
- University of Denver School of
Art & Art History
- Jeff Juliard
and in Private Collections

My art has been exhibited in galleries in New York City (CBGB’s 313 Gallery - thanks to David Fitschen and other galleries), Newark, NJ (City Without Walls) and Hoboken, NJ (Maxwell’s and others), Denver area (Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, Kirk Norlin Gallery, University of Denver's School of Art and Art History Gallery, Café Mars, The Pirate and Blu Toste), San Diego (Rita Dean) and Los Angeles (La Luz De Jesus and Dark’s Art Parlour).

Partial exhibition list:
2015 “Bibelot Show”, Kanon Art Gallery, Denver, CO, November
2015 “Conscious and Unconscious: Subjects of the Real & Surreal”, Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, Arvada, CO, June
2013 “WOW - Wide Open Whatever!”, Core New Art Space, Denver, CO, May
2000 “The Underside: Skateboard Art Revealed”, University of Denver's School of Art and Art History Gallery, Denver, CO, September
1999 “Three of No Kind - Arno/Cunis/Fitschen”, CBGB’s 313...