CHAPTER 3: AMY (ELISIF)
For Peter, Leslie Jamison’s lament for Amy Winehouse becomes a keen for his daughter.
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Amy (Elisif)
Peter Bruun
2019, 15”x22”, watercolor, gouache & pencil on paper
“I would have loved to hear Amy Winehouse sing sober.”
Leslie Jamison (who I’m reading again today) had also been lost to substances for a time. For her, it is no leap of imagination to Amy (to Elisif).
“Like she’s been air-dropped into a moment she can’t possibly fathom.”
A cloud’s shadow skitters by. Looking up, I think of them as a trio of raging brilliance: Amy the singer. Elisif the artist. Leslie the writer (the survivor), her prose elegiac.
“Drunken stumbling under the broken tower of her beehive, her body barely holding up the weight until it wasn’t, until it couldn’t any longer.”
That’s the moment I draw: her beehive, swaying in purple and black.
(I would have loved to see you draw sober.)