So many of our art experiences take place online these days.
On my website, I have tried to adapt to this reality: I have my work professionally photographed, and on my gallery page I include a magnifying effect for up-close viewing of the works’ surfaces. In this way I try to offer a facsimile of the real thing.
But for the most part, I still favor sharing my work unmediated by technology.
Though not always.
I made Hello, Is This Peter? (shown above) while in residence at Yellow Barn Music Festival in 2017. I was inspired by Landscape II, a musical composition by Toshio Hosokawa. To my mind, the musical piece captures perfectly the emotional journey I imagined my daughter traveled suffering from substance use disorder. I wanted to make a drawing expressing that taut tightrope she walked, trying not to fall (yet falling).
This drawing is the result.
In the reproduction above, you can’t see any of that: it’s too small, words and details lost; seeing it – especially as I see it – lost.
Which is where technology becomes my friend.
Inspired by music, Hello, Is This Peter? is best experienced with the music. Thus, the video at this link. It includes as soundtrack excerpts from Landscape II, and thus conveys the spirit of dance between image and sound I had in mind in making the drawing. How else could I have shown that but through a video?
For better or worse, so many of our art experiences take place online these days. And in this case, for the better.
—Peter