Peter Young was born on 2 January 1940 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Los Angeles. He moved to New York in 1960 to study art history at New York University and began painting full-time after he graduated in 1963. He held his first solo exhibition in 1968 at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, and in the same year he also held a solo exhibition at the Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne. During the late 1960s and early 1970s Young achieved considerable recognition in the art press, and exhibited in an umber of solo and group exhibitions. In 1969 he left New York for a few months to live in a remote village in Costa Rica, then moved on to Utah and New Mexico, finally settling in Brisbee, Arizona. These wanderings removed him from the New York art scene in the 1970s, though he continued to exhibit occasionally, notably at the Goldowsky Gallery (1970, 1972, 1974). Early in 1984 he held a solo exhibition of paintings from the previous three years at the Oil and Steel Gallery, New York.