Peter St.Lawrence is an artist, stylist, and designer based in California.

peterstlawrence@gmail.com

ABOUT

He works as an art director, prop stylist, and as an interior design consultant, while maintaining a robust studio practice. St.Lawrence is a Prop Stylist for still photography as well as Lead Art Department and Set Dressing for video, often designing the entire set. Notable clients include Cartier, Neiman Markus, Land Rover, Facebook, Pottery Barn, Williams Sonoma, and Sundance Catalog. With a robust background in floral design, he is often sought out when a set calls for a strong botanical influence. His fine art has exhibited at the De Young Museum, Vessel Gallery, Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, and Anno Domini among many others. He has been exhibiting with SLATE Contemporary since 2018.

St.Lawrence has been a pillar of the Oakland art community since he earned his BFA in sculpture from California College of the Arts in 2001. He was a co-founder and director of FM, artist studios and fine art gallery where he curated for 10 years. His early work focused on figurative sculpture, statues, portraits, and busts. As he started engaging more with the interior design world, contributing eventually to the design of several Bay Area restaurants, he started creating simpler forms in his studio, which were applied to vessels and lighting. In his most recent body of work, St.Lawrence has shed all ornament and function, focusing on pure form, with a series of table-top sculptures that feel minimal, contemporary, classic, organic, serious, and playful all at the same time.

Iconographically, the work references human shapes and ancient sculpture, while stylistically leaning toward mid-century modernism. Certainly, the work’s simplicity brings it toward minimalism and a serious kind of formalism –a realm where the grace in the arc of a curve, the play between form and negative space, and the beauty of the pure material, are poetic and engaging enough to give the work a compelling presence.

At the same time, and in contrast to a categorical and canonical minimalism, there is also something very human about St.Lawrence’s work, that brings a warmth and honesty to it. This humanity can be found in the occasionally anthropomorphic forms, in the quirky sense of humor and play, and in the physical tactility of the objects, whose raw and glazed surfaces show just enough hand to remind the viewer of the physical process of making that brought them into the world.