Peter Beard

Images of the dying

He was in the midst of a revival, his art had come around again, these snapshots of moments which are daubed with blood, spit, ink and rubbish represent a life in art. He decided to do an Yves Klein on one of the canvas prints, but not with paint and nubile young women in contorted positions. Peter is never derivative. He daubed himself with the carefully acquired cow’s blood and lay down on the giant print so a corpse-like bloody image was printed on the top frame of the picture of two cheetahs in the Taru desert. He floats, a specter of him, in that empty desert sky. That afternoon, in the basement of The Time is Always Now was another of those art history moments. The stink of fetid blood, of Peter’s sweat all infused within that image.

It’s part of the tacit ritual that Peter B comes with a retinue of hangers on and hopefuls, people who hoped he might graze their little lives with some of his gold-dust. Rekha, much younger, perky, had been working at the Karen Blixen Museum in Denmark. Karen Blixen had been his introduction to the Old Africa he knew. His portrait of her, old and syphilitic shows a woman whom Africa destroyed, her dreams, her love, her coffee farm, she lost everything and still she couldn’t help herself, she loved her Africa. She wrote in her book, that she knew Africa, because we do, those of us who have been bitten by her, it infects our souls, “But what,” she wrote, “Does Africa know of me?”

TIA, he used to say. This is Africa. It is the sad mantra of all of us who have lived there for any length of time. Peter didn’t Disneyfy Africa in his portrayal of her, he showed her loss and the melancholy which makes her, and in this way he drew from her beauty and captured her impermanence. This is life on the edge of death in a frozen frame.

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