Peter Kubina
Biography
Peter Kubina was born on September 11, 1940, at an orphanage in Biesnitz, in the easternmost county of Goerlitz (Schlesien) in what later became East Germany. His mother was Elsa Rechel, Elsa Schmechtig, a Lutheran evangelical Christian. When he was eighteen months old, Peter was adopted by Erwin Pfeiffer, also an evangelical Lutheran, who had been conscripted into the German Army, and his wife, Ruth, whose surname at birth was Krinssiki. Peter never met his biological mother or father after his adoption. In 1945, the Pfeiffer family escaped the Russian invasion by train, travelling from Westphalia to southern Germany, where they settled in Germany’s southernmost Town of Weiler in the county of Algäu, in Westallgaeu, east of Lake Konstanz (county of Bodensee), near the Austrian border.
Erwin Pfeiffer became a teacher at a school, Sohnle Lindenberg, three and a half kilometers north of Weiler, and was later dean of physics and mathematics there. Peter attended the school where his father taught. In 1959, at the age of 19, Peter graduated from Oberreal Schule, a combination high school/college, where he had received some instruction in art as part of the curriculum. Upon graduating, he entered the army for eighteen months of compulsory service with the Reisprinzung in the Bundeswehr until October 1962, when he was discharged with the rank of lieutenant in the reserves.
After his military service, Peter enrolled at Maximilian University in Munich, where he studied geography and economics. While there, he attended evening classes in figure drawing to prepare for the entrance examinations for the Academy of Arts in Munich, part of the University of Munich. He was then referred to Adolf Vallazza, in the Town of Ortisei, near Bolzano in South Tirol, in the Dolamite Alps of northeastern Italy, a five-hour drive south of Lindenberg, where Peter had attended school. There, on May 3, 1963, Peter became the apprentice of Adolf Vallazzo, a master wood carver, and his brother, Markus, and spent the next year and a half at their studio, learning proper woodcarving.
Later, Peter returned to Munich, where he was hired by a Dr. Sperr, a psychiatrist who became Peter’s landlord. Peter sat for the entrance examinations of the Art Academy, was successful, and enrolled under his birth name of Peter Kubina. At the Academy, Peter received instruction from Professor Heinrich Kirchner, a sculptor and well-known bronze caster. In 1965, Peter resolved to find somewhere where he could live alone, to find himself and develop his art. On a recommendation from a friend, he chose the Spanish island of Ibiza, 81 miles off the east coast of Spain. On his arrival there, he met a South African named Ivan Spence, who had created and owned an art gallery, now the oldest and most prestigious on the Island. Spence invited Peter to live rent free in his unused, half-built, self-constructed country house outside of San Carlos, in return for which Peter made several large sculptures for Spence’s property.
In 1967, Peter met a visiting American student, Sandra Price. In December 1967, with the help of Sandra’s father, Peter travelled to New York, where he met Sandra’s brothers, Bill and David, and then travelled to Ft. Lauderdale, where he met their parents and married Sandra on January 5, 1968.
Peter and Sandra found an apartment nearby, and Peter took classes at night school in engineering drafting and architectural design while continuing to produce art and teaching classes in sculpture. After completing his night program, he obtained employment doing engineering drafting to support his continuing art. In September 1968, Peter and Sandra drove from Ft. Lauderdale to Mexico. For nine months, they were the guests at the country home in Temixco, south of Cuernavaca, of Mathias Goeritz, a Mexican sculptor whose contact information Henry Moore had given to Peter during his visit to Moore’s studio in England. Sandra briefly taught English at the English-American Institute in Cuernavaca while Peter studied pre-Columbian art and incorporated it into his sculpture and painting.
In June 1969, Peter and Sandra returned to Florida, where they secured an apartment in Coral Gables, where they owned and managed a tiny storefront art gallery and art school. Peter and Sandra’s son, Leif Tait Kubina, who was born at Mercy Hospital in Miami on May 25, 1970. After several years of struggling, each with day and night jobs at differing times, raising their young child, and Peter trying to pursue his art, Peter and Sandra grew apart. Finally, they were divorced on consent on June 28, 1973.
In February 1971, an Indian Yogi and monk, Baba Hari Dass, was teaching in the US. In 1972, as interest in yoga grew, several events were organized that included demonstrations of yoga asanas, shatkarma, and mudras (Lama Foundation in New Mexico, Santa Cruz, California, and Coconut Grove in Florida, where Peter and Sandra met him. Baba Hari Dass started weekly Yoga Sutras of Patanjali classes at the University of California, at Santa Cruz, CA in 1975. After Peter and Sandra’s divorce in 1973, Peter moved to Santa Cruz to study the teachings of Haridas and continue working on his art.
In Santa Cruz, Peter lived for a time at the property Hari Dass that his community were building at Mt. Madonna. Later, he moved to Watsonville, in Santa Clara County, where he continued to produce art while earning a modest living driving a taxi cab for Green Cab.
Peter continued working in bronze, wood, clay, wax and stone in his sculpture and chiefly in oil and acrylic in his painting. Beginning in about 2000, he produced digital art employing the new tools available through the Photo Shop application to import colors and shapes into his abstract forms. His art was not attached to a particular national, cultural or religious tradition, but created its spiritual impact through a language understood by many cultures. His last sculpture, featuring vertical structures depended for their support on forms that were suspended among them, creating a balanced inter-dependence of form and structure.
Peter died of cancer on July 14, 2016.