(1969- )
Peter Stichbury (b.1969) lives and works in New Zealand. Interestingly, the subject matter that he has been dealing with stems from experiences in his childhood. When he was seven, he thought that he saw something shooting across the sky in broad daylight. Though he no longer believes that the object was anything out of the ordinary, the moment was a creative sucker punch for the portraitist: At the age of forty- six, Stichbury is enraptured by UFOs as ever and devotes his work to them.
His works’ delicate, pale countenance and their preoccupied gaze suggest that the close encounter has left him removing any firm sense of a singular reality. Stichbury’s exaggerated realism reinforces a sense of otherworldliness and an internal disorientation, both of which communicate the subject’s ambivalence towards traditional assumptions about the primacy of the human organism in the cosmos.
Peter Stichbury completed Postgraduate studies at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland (Masters/ Honors Scholarship). The inclusion of Peter Stichbury’s work in the Museum of New Zealand - Te Papa Tongarewa's exhibition, Art of the Nation in 2007, consolidated the credibility of a unique portrait of the artist who had won the prestigious Wallace Art Award in New Zealand in the year he graduated.