Peter Manion didn’t discover his artistic potential until his senior year of high school. “I had a phenomenal art teacher who saw an ability in me,” Manion says. “I knew I could draw, but art was never a consideration.”
His teacher encouraged him to apply to art school, and Manion enrolled at the Art Institute in Chicago. After college, he lived “the typical artist bohemian lifestyle” in Chicago before moving back to St. Louis.
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“St. Louis was a difficult city for artists in 1998. It was difficult making connections here,” he says. Manion had a few small shows but began working in construction after renovating his home and realizing that he liked the work. When the housing market crashed, Manion left construction to be a stay-at-home dad, and in 2010 he started painting again. He exhibited his first show in 2012 at SPACE Architecture + Design. “That was the beginning,” he says. “I’ve been slowly growing my work ever since.”
How do you describe your style? I draw things simply. I paint abstractly. I’m a person of material and lines and texture. All the tools I would normally use in construction have reemerged in the way I make my work. I’m not a paintbrush painter. I use trowels, plaster, spray paint, and rollers.
What are you working on now? I’ve been developing new work that plays with two and three-dimensional mediums. I use felt and plaster to create moveable sculptures. You can play with it and make different things. The idea of this work is that it’s temporary and that it falls apart and decays, which is like our lives. It’s not about living forever. As you get older, you have more details and are more interesting.
How did you come up with this idea? It’s one of these flukes that happened. I had installed a piece of blue felt as a backdrop to photograph my work, and I was working with plaster on my drawings. I was cleaning my trowel, and I put it on top of the felt and it just built up over time. Eventually I had to switch it out.
So the work directs the outcome? Yes. You have to be here. Artists need to be rooted. The only way I’d find this is by coming to the studio and putting in the time.
Any sources of inspiration? Harold Rosenberg, Nancy Spero, Carol Walker, but it’s not necessarily their work. I mean, it’s their work, of course, but it’s what I gather from it. It’s how they find interesting ways of speaking to you. My children inspire me. I like it when they come to work with me. Their fluidity is sort of where I want to be. Working on ideas without fear.
You’ve recently completed two residencies. How have these shaped you as an artist? In Spain, there was something about going there that validated me as an artist. I was working 14–16 hours; I was deep in it. Vermont was validation from my peers. Vermont gave me a community of artists who didn’t know me, but we had the same understanding of what is going on in the world, and they supported me in ways that I’d never felt before.
Have you changed your approach over the years? I made a piece, and someone came to open studio and bought it. It was the first piece that I made that was completely abstract, and she found her own story in it. Before, I had always put all these little details in [my paintings], thinking, maybe someone will see this mark or this thing, but people weren’t getting it. What I realized is that I was trying to control the reaction. I was trying to say, ‘Look at my story.’ This woman loved the piece because it felt like her life. She said, ‘I’m this line,’ and I didn’t mean it that way.
