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What are the essential ingredients of a creative life? How does an artist become an artist? For those of us who strive to juggle our career and family, our jobs and our true passions, The Smile at the Heart of Things offers insight into the ways people balance their world and contemplates how religion, family, loss, love, and even personal struggles inform our lives and make them richer.
The key ingredients to a creative life, suggests author
Brian H. Peterson, are nourishment, honesty, beauty, depth, and hunger. These ingredients form the five main sections of the book, within which Peterson gathers essays about art and artists, journal excerpts, and life storiesnot the entire story of someone’s life he says, “but a story from life that is also a glimpse into a life
Drawing on his experiences as a musician, visual artist, scholar, and museum curator at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA, Peterson connects larger issues of creativity and the human spirit with his own search for growth and meaning. “For 15 years I’ve led a double life he notes, working as an arts administrator and curator by day and pursuing his photography and writing by night. “This book was born out of a simple question: Why must the two halves of my life be so separate And it examines how he—like many other artists—has begun to pull together all the parts and pieces.
But The Smile at the Heart of Things is much more than observations and musings about the sources of creativity. Peterson draws a wise and frank portrait of both the sweetness and sadness of life, the difficult times and the celebratory. Even as he looks into the face of death, illness, and despair, Peterson always turns
his stories to the joy and love that underlie all—the smile at the heart of things.
Praise for The Smile at the Heart of Things:
“The Smile at the Heart of Things is a luminous book. It’s open, quirky, vulnerable, wise. It rings true
—Dennis Lee, poet and essayist; poet laureate of Toronto, 2001–2004
“Peterson has an incredible way of encapsulating his life experience in powerful and imaginative prose (tinged with a kind of poetry). At times I feel an almost Proustian sense of ‘lost time ”
—George Crumb, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer
“The Smile at the Heart of Things is a very personal and touching book that is deeply and heart-searchingly important. The stories from life are a true treasure
—Emmet Gowin, photographer; professor of photography, Princeton University
“In a day, I devoured Brian Peterson’s lovely memoir on art and artists, life, love and marriage, work, museums, human strength, habits-of-mind, diminishment and death. Now nothing in the house is worth reading or watching or even doing, so ardent and tender and enduring are his stories
—Mary E. Case, founding director, Qm2; former director, Office of the Registrar, Smithsonian Institution
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
BRIAN H. PETERSON, has more than thirty years' experience as a curator, critic, artist, and arts administrator in the Philadelphia area. The Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator at the James A. Michener Art Museum, he was the editor and principal author of the major Michener publication Pennsylvania Impressionism as well as monographs on painters William L. Lathrop, Robert Spencer, and Charles Rosen. His critical writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, American- Arts Quarterly, Photo Review, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
As a practicing artist, Peterson has had more than thirty solo exhibitions of his photographs since 1980. His work is in the collections of the Amon Carter Museum, Denver Art Museum, Library of Congress, Milwaukee Art Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
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The Smile at the Heart of Things: Essays and Life Stories
Co-published by Tell Me Press and the James A. Michener Art Museum
ISBN- 978-0-9819835-5-4
Nonfiction/hardcover limited edition $28.95 US/$34.95 Canada
Publication Date: January 1, 2010
248 pages, 47 black-and-white and full-color photos
