Kite Personalities - George Peters

“I like the combination of making something fine and then throwing it to the winds.” This is George Peters on making and flying kites. “I like the imper­manence of kites, their essential fragility, their lightness. Kite flying is using nature, using the wind. The wind becomes part of the work.” After school­ing at California 's Fullerton College and Art Center School and an inspira­tional summer at an art center on a Greek island, Peters spent more than a decade earning his living by doing quick watercolor portraits for all comers. He learned the art at Disneyland as an undergraduate and con­tinued it in Honolulu , operating from a sidewalk stand on Waikiki . At $60 an hour, Peters supported a lifestyle that included a house and his own boat. “I once figured out that I've done 40,000 portraits,” he says. “My worst nightmare is walking into a house and seeing one of them framed and hanging on the wall.” Self-deprecation is one of Peters' charms. Hav­ing done an installation sculpture in an art gallery, Peters found himself with leftover ripstop nylon and decided to manufacture kites with it. “They crashed, of course; I didn't know anything about kites or wind.” But now interested, he studied up and decided kites were a fit expression for his artistic impulses.

Seeking a cheaper lifestyle, Peters settled in Boulder , Colorado in 1982 and con­ structed himself a studio reflecting his catholic interests. Decorations ranged from lead animals to architectural models, from blow-guns to boomerangs, with shelf after shelf of art flotsam. “It looked like a Soyuz spacecraft,” he says. Peters could spend days in his shop never leaving. “That was a motive for my kite making. It got me outdoors. I tend to get too pale otherwise.” Peters did corporate commissions such as mobiles and banners and put out a mail order catalogue offering some twenty kites—birds to bees, dragon­flies to fighters—and was always back-ordered, a tribute to the quality of his creations. A thoughtful man, Peters sees kitemaking and flying as the eter­nal puzzle. Up close, the kite is huge, but flying way up in the sky it looks like a postage stamp. The issue is how to design it so it looks “intense,” his word, both up close and far way.

Because of his innovative approach,, Peters has been all over the world, flying and teaching. “Travel is one of the perks of the sport,” he notes. At his workshops, he emphasizes originality. “Let the materials dictate what is made from them.” At a paperfold kite class, for example, a student made a hat in the shape of a Cody kite. It looked good on his head, just as good flying in the sky. “Flight, that's what it's all about,” Peters says. "I like to put up as many kites as possible, then lie down and watch them. It's the festival effect I really like.”

Recent years have found George and partner Melanie Walker in the studio designing and constructing large-scale sculptures for common areas in buildings. They bring materials common to kite making – plastics, ripstop, carbon-fiber and string – to make imaginative, whimsical, and uplifting sculptures.

Adapted from an article in 1991 Kite Pin Invitational, a Drachen Foundation publication (1995)