Hello, Is This Peter? The tale of a daughter’s trauma, and a father’s healing by the telling of it.
Peter Bruun
2017, 29.5” x 11.5”, ink, watercolor, gouache, pencil on paper
In summer 2017, Peter spent three weeks as resident artist at the Yellow Barn Music Festival in Putney, Vermont.
Sketch by Peter Bruun of Yellow Barn musicians rehearsing Landscape II.
During that time he sat in on rehearsals, sketching the musicians as they worked on chamber pieces to be performed later in the summer.
In one such session, Peter heard Toshio Hosokawa’s Landscape II for the first time.
Unexpectedly, the emotional energy of the piece brought to mind his daughter’s journey through addiction to death.
Inspired directly by Landscape II and playing the piece over and over again, he made the drawing Hello, Is This Peter?
Hello, Is This Peter?, Peter Bruun, 2017, 29.5” x 11.5”, ink, watercolor, gouache, pencil on paper
In the drawing, Peter echoes aspects of Japanese scroll painting: open space and horizontal flow in contemplative calm. In Japanese scrolls, the poets’ words written in black are answered by the collectors’ red stamped marks; in Peter’s piece, his daughter’s unsettling journal excerpts in pencil reverberate in counterpoint to the composer’s meditations in black ink.
Peter revisited the trauma of his daughter’s death while making the drawing. Echoing the musical piece, it delivers a truth: that we humans are fully subject to nature’s ebb and flow, connected to forces larger than ourselves.
In that, Peter found acceptance—a healing—a kind of grace.