Jeff Peters is a painter and illustrator whose work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions across the United States for over two decades. His practice is rooted in a sustained inquiry into memory, perception, and the constructed nature of beauty. In his most recent series, Peters engages with landscape not as a genre of direct observation but as an evolving psychological and technological space, drawing from family photographs, personal recollection, and the generative input of artificial intelligence. These works explore the slippage between memory and invention, image and ideal, and speak to a broader interest in how we reconstruct the visual world through layered systems of representation.

​

Earlier in his career, Peters developed a hybrid visual language that fused the emotional resonance of nineteenth-century German Romanticism with strategies drawn from collage, Superflat aesthetics, and color field abstraction. This convergence of historical and contemporary modes reflected his deeper interrogation of the aesthetics of desire, and the uneasy role of beauty as both cultural artifact and personal inheritance. Having grown up in an environment where order and appearance were paramount, Peters articulates what he calls “a suspicion of beauty, of value, and of desire” a sensibility that permeates much of his work.

​

His paintings often operate within this space of contradiction: seductive yet skeptical, carefully composed yet quietly subversive. A backyard fruit tree, for instance, may be rendered as “an overworked, overproducing glitzy starlet, bearing fruit so flawless it belongs on a cosmetic ad.” With a disarming blend of humor and tension, Peters invites viewers and curators alike to confront the coded aesthetics of idealization and ask: What beauty can be trusted?

Jeff Peters was born in Long Beach, California in 1975 and currently lives and works in Costa Mesa, California.