The IdeaLists

Cleon Peterson came of age painting, skateboarding and dabbling in the underbellies of a 90s New York. A fresh college dropout, he got a start designing skateboards in San Diego where his brother pro-skated. After overcoming 10 years of drug addiction and the struggles that tag alongside, Cleon started working at Shepard Fairy’s Studio Number One. He also shows his art globally. White Flag, a recent show in Los Angeles, exhbited his paintings and primal visions of devient societies.

What I have seen your work described as dystopian and violent – I wonder if you think there’s also a bit of humor in their darkness?

I totally do. I basically take something and push it to the utmost extreme that it could be. There’s something funny and ridiculous about that. A lot of people don’t get that element of satire. It’s way over the top and absurd. Some of the work and city scenes come from actual experience.

That’s the kind of story I want to tell. The game that people play, the way that people become deviant to function within a society. If you’re given the rules, but there’s no way to follow those rules and succeed in life, you deviate—you become a drug dealer or a criminal. Those are the strategies. Everyone has to find new ways to come up in the world. It’s about different cultures and elements coming together and the tensions and releases that follow.

What intrigues you about cities?

I think you go to the city to prove yourself. One thing that I like about the city, I get this thrill from being in a place that’s kind of dangerous. Walking down a street and feeling like you’re out of your element and that there’s danger around every corner. In my painting that’s the kind of feeling that I try to evoke. When I moved to New York, and even in Seattle, there was this excitement to being in that broken part of the city. But now I almost can’t wait to move out of the city. I don’t need this congestion on my brain (laughs).

How do you feel about the Internet as a big city negotiating with an unclear set of rules and chaos?

When I moved to New York I felt the anxiety of being a small person in a big world. The internet is the ultimate big city. I don’t know if the web creates chaos, but there are elements about it that bother me. You can share whatever you want to share, and that can be both a good thing and a bad thing. One of the negative aspects is people expressing negative or destructive opinions with no personal accountability. I also sometimes feel that there’s a complete information and image overload. Everyone’s being exposed to things so quickly and in such quantity that there’s no way to take it in. You get wound up in this state of anxiety where you don’t know what’s up and down, and you can’t formulate your own opinions because there’s an overload of pluralistic information.

What type of work to you blends creativity and commerce in a way you like?

I think there are two different types of work commercially: There’s good work that pushes boundaries and is culturally active and there’s bad, schlocky work that's primary objective is to brainwash people and sell people things they don't need. There are good projects and bad projects;  good companies and shit companies. Doing commercial work is great as long as you believe in and support whatever messaging and product you’re producing. That’s why I like to work in the cultural sections—music, art, nonprofits—you actually feel like you’re contributing rather than twisting somebody’s arm or manipulating.

Why do you think art is seen as privilege instead of necessary to survival?

I think that art is not a utilitarian thing. It acts more of a way that a myth or religion or shaman works. It tells a story that isn’t really in the collective conscious yet. It reaches outside of what we all know right now and speaks to us from a level that’s an emotional connection, something an artist sees, or a premonition. There’s a kind of intangible quality to art that you can’t measure in usage. I like to think of it as a mystical, magical thing.

Paintings by Cleon Peterson. Graphic work by Cleon Peterson + Studio Number One.