Meet Artist Peter Cusak

Man with Book (2024), 77″H x 55″W, oil on canvas.

Wolf Skin (2023), 77″H x 65″W, oil on canvas.

Stone, Wisdom (2024), 77″H x 55″W, oil on canvas.

An arrangement of Cusack’s sculptures.

Flutist Serenade (2022), 18″H x 24″W, oil on canvas.

Four Figures From My Life (2022), 40″H x 30″W, oil on canvas.

Stone, Green (2024), 24″H x 20″W, oil on canvas.

Artist Peter Cusack.

Peter Cusack says he wouldn’t call his approach to painting Buddhist or Zen, but the parallels are as hard to ignore as a masterful Japanese ink painting.

Cusack grew up in the Bronxville section of Yonkers, New York, struggled with dyslexia, worked after college in magazine production, and felt himself increasingly drawn to fine art. So he saved his money and after some introductory art classes, moved to France’s Loire Valley to study with a painter who had previously been a Buddhist monk.

There he received an education very different from typical art schools. There were no grades and no deadlines. “I worked on one still life for an entire year,” Cusack says. “As long as I was willing to sit and learn, he was willing to teach, and the idea of product didn’t exist.”

“Students today want to get right to drawing the figure,” Cusack says, which can reduce the human form to mere mathematics. Instead Cusack learned about energy and motion. “For the first two months with a model we didn’t draw the figure, we just drew inner curves and tilts until they were embedded in us.”

Cusack’s teacher talked about finding relief from the world’s chaos by observing simple, natural things. “Rather than a grasping, aggressive, recording mind,” he says, he was taught “to cultivate a soft, open mind, ready to receive information, like a butterfly landing on a lotus. We were doing this not just to make paintings, but to be a part of something benevolent in the world.”

Today in his Torrington studio, thanks to this training, Cusack confronts each new painting (and the occasional sculpture) not as an intellectual process, but as capturing gesture and movement from one moment in time. Like a meditation, he turns off music and other distractions, grounds his bare feet to the floor, and channels an image through his body. And like Japanese ink paintings, there’s not a lot of concern about background or depth, and very little overpainting.

“It’s one breath,” he says. “I want to be as true to the moment as possible. You can’t control it. You just have to yield.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Peter Cusack’s studio in Torrington is open by appointment. To contact him or see more of his work, visit petercusack.com.