Peyton Dollar is an artist based in Nashville, Tennessee working primarily in abstract painting and photography. His work explores memory, perception, and the quiet unraveling of personal myth.

After years of documenting life as a photographer, Peyton began moving from image making as observation and turned to his inner world of imagination and the unreal. What began as a shift in medium soon became something deeper: a commitment to creating work rooted in feeling, fragment, and the imagined real. His paintings are emotional field notes: layered, raw, and reflective of an ongoing conversation between solitude, intuition, and the memories he holds from years as a photographer.

Peyton’s practice lives at the intersection of memory and mark making. He’s now less interested in replicating reality and more drawn to what is felt, misremembered, and mythologized. Whether through expressive abstraction, written language, or textural experimentation, his work often begins in a moment of stillness: stepping in, making a mark, stepping back, and turning the work into something symbolic

He describes his paintings as “logs of stopping and remembering—turned from what we actually see into what we think we see.” This tension between reality and interpretation is central to his evolving body of work.

Peyton currently lives and works inside his home in Nashville, where he continues to explore new visual languages, protect his creative space, and make room for slowness in the modern, fast moving world .