Peter Wowkowych is an artist and architect living in Santa Monica, California. He works as an acrylic, oil and encaustic painter, as well as photographer, sculptor and curator. 

 

Born and raised in upstate New York of Ukrainian and Slovak parents, Peter spent his formative college years in Indiana and Rome, Italy. His early career aspirations took him to New York City to practice architecture and explore the late 1980‘s art world blossoming in Soho and TriBeCa. In the early 1990‘s he made his way to Venice, California to connect to the rambuncious Southern California art and architecture scene.

 

Peter’s abstracted figurative and landscape paintings as well as totemic sculptural work, explore the physical, psychic and sensual boundaries between people and places, and the duality between the real world we inhabit, and an other world we wish to escape to.  He is always searching for the light. As an architect he struggles with the built environment’s consumption of the natural environment, and the impact of humans on our planet. He is intrigued in how people, places and experiences shape who we become.

 

Peter is deeply influenced by his work in the developing world where he engages with communities to restore, celebrate and understand their often fragile cultural heritage. One of his inspiring achievements, while working with Restoration Works International, was a 10 year proejct rebuilding a 300 year old Tibetan Buddhist monastery high in the Himalayan mountains of Nepal, restoring the social and spiritual center of this isolated community at the rooftop of the world.

 

Peter is also exploring making art with others where yoga and meditation give non artists a voice and the tools to creatively express themselves openly and without judgment.