The Baldwin Prize commissioned artist Peter Bruun to create this year's poster. In this lightly edited interview transcript, Bruun explains his process to Prize founder Lionel Foster. We would love for you to have and share this work. Click here to request a free poster or five postcards with the image. Special thanks to Jay Perry for graphic design layout.
Making Socially Engaged Art
For many years I have thought of myself as a covert social engagement artist, making seemingly esoteric and abstract paintings and drawings that in actuality are grounded in real things and relevant to others. My art is not really complete for me until its implicit narrative content is animated, typically through exhibitions and events that combine my art with stories from those whose own lives relate to its themes. My practice has brought me outside rarified art spaces, building connections between art and human issues.
When I lived in Baltimore, which is where you and I met, creating such communal experiences was entirely doable. But when I moved to Maine three years ago, I was separated from a well-established network that allowed me to connect easily with others. My abstract images--symbols or spirits or souls of ideas rather than embodiments--needed another solution besides community collaboration to make real this complementary aspect of concrete story.
That’s when I began writing directly onto my drawings in a sustained, ongoing way. Most specifically, I was processing through my art grief over my daughter’s passing and all that came with that. The story aspect was vital, and the way I dealt with some of that was to get words from others and put it physically in the drawings.
I had been making art this way for a couple years when you wandered back into my life and said, “Hey, could you do something for the Baldwin Prize?”
The project for the Baldwin Prize fits in that wheelhouse.
The Baldwin Prize Project
Once we knew I would combine an abstract image with Baldwin’s words, you and I began a process to sharpen the parameters of my task. First we talked about logistics, such as size and dimensions, then narrowed in. We floated a few different Baldwin quotations to use. You were clear I had freedom, which was good. The risk of any commission is that it can be soulless, just a gig. I needed to figure out that sweet spot where what Baldwin is saying resonates with a personal passion. We found that. The quotation we landed perfectly aligned with the theme of a project I had been working on about traveling through my own painful experience. To paraphrase Baldwin: You think you’re alone, alienated within your own unique bubble of suffering, and then you read and discover you’re not. And there’s so much solace in finding others with related experiences. It absolutely confirms our indelible connections to one another as humans.
Making the Drawing
When it came to making the actual drawing, my process was largely intuitive. I think of my linear abstractions as figurative. The way I begin work like this is almost like visualizing dance: body posture conveys human emotion. I visualize in my head a body taking certain poses. I don’t end up with an actual figure, but the initial mark might be the bend of an arm. I’ll put one bend of an arm down and maybe another. The way in is to make these marks in response to the figure I have in my head. The image in my head was of someone in pain, bent over. Then I would shift in my head and see a figure in elation or someone experiencing joy or connection.
So that was my way into the drawing. With this piece, I had the concept of a figure kind of wrapping around the quote a little bit, sort of holding it up. Once I began making marks, as I entered into the work, the drawing started taking on a life of its own. So there are some conscious things going on and some intuitive things going on. One conscious thing: I wanted to use all the colors of the rainbow to capture the full range of human experience that writing conveys. And I wanted that sense of things rising, things being cut, bodies within the form. I only know I’m finished with a drawing once it stops talking at me, telling me what to do or change. When it’s silent, then I know nothing else needs to be done. It’s complete.
The thing about the words: I used ink. When I wrote those words there were two ink blots that fell. When the first one happened, I immediately thought, “Oh shit! I fucked it up.” But then right away I realized I liked the accident. It felt like it belonged there, evidence of doing the work. Then it happened again. I came to believe those ink blots are indicative of the experience of going into your pain. That to me felt consistent with the spirit of the figure. In a sense this drawing is about working through pain and arriving at beauty.
Making Socially Engaged Art
For many years I have thought of myself as a covert social engagement artist, making seemingly esoteric and abstract paintings and drawings that in actuality are grounded in real things and relevant to others. My art is not really complete for me until its implicit narrative content is animated, typically through exhibitions and events that combine my art with stories from those whose own lives relate to its themes. My practice has brought me outside rarified art spaces, building connections between art and human issues.
When I lived in Baltimore, which is where you and I met, creating such communal experiences was entirely doable. But when I moved to Maine three years ago, I was separated from a well-established network that allowed me to connect easily with others. My abstract images--symbols or spirits or souls of ideas rather than embodiments--needed another solution besides community collaboration to make real this complementary aspect of concrete story.
That’s when I began writing directly onto my drawings in a sustained, ongoing way. Most specifically, I was processing through my art grief over my daughter’s passing and all that came with that. The story aspect was vital, and the way I dealt with some of that was to get words from others and put it physically in the drawings.
I had been making art this way for a couple years when you wandered back into my life and said, “Hey, could you do something for the Baldwin Prize?”
The project for the Baldwin Prize fits in that wheelhouse.
The Baldwin Prize Project
Once we knew I would combine an abstract image with Baldwin’s words, you and I began a process to sharpen the parameters of my task. First we talked about logistics, such as size and dimensions, then narrowed in. We floated a few different Baldwin quotations to use. You were clear I had freedom, which was good. The risk of any commission is that it can be soulless, just a gig. I needed to figure out that sweet spot where what Baldwin is saying resonates with a personal passion. We found that. The quotation we landed perfectly aligned with the theme of a project I had been working on about traveling through my own painful experience. To paraphrase Baldwin: You think you’re alone, alienated within your own unique bubble of suffering, and then you read and discover you’re not. And there’s so much solace in finding others with related experiences. It absolutely confirms our indelible connections to one another as humans.
Making the Drawing
When it came to making the actual drawing, my process was largely intuitive. I think of my linear abstractions as figurative. The way I begin work like this is almost like visualizing dance: body posture conveys human emotion. I visualize in my head a body taking certain poses. I don’t end up with an actual figure, but the initial mark might be the bend of an arm. I’ll put one bend of an arm down and maybe another. The way in is to make these marks in response to the figure I have in my head. The image in my head was of someone in pain, bent over. Then I would shift in my head and see a figure in elation or someone experiencing joy or connection.
So that was my way into the drawing. With this piece, I had the concept of a figure kind of wrapping around the quote a little bit, sort of holding it up. Once I began making marks, as I entered into the work, the drawing started taking on a life of its own. So there are some conscious things going on and some intuitive things going on. One conscious thing: I wanted to use all the colors of the rainbow to capture the full range of human experience that writing conveys. And I wanted that sense of things rising, things being cut, bodies within the form. I only know I’m finished with a drawing once it stops talking at me, telling me what to do or change. When it’s silent, then I know nothing else needs to be done. It’s complete.
The thing about the words: I used ink. When I wrote those words there were two ink blots that fell. When the first one happened, I immediately thought, “Oh shit! I fucked it up.” But then right away I realized I liked the accident. It felt like it belonged there, evidence of doing the work. Then it happened again. I came to believe those ink blots are indicative of the experience of going into your pain. That to me felt consistent with the spirit of the figure. In a sense this drawing is about working through pain and arriving at beauty.
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