Peter Beard The End Of The Game
The life of Peter Beard is of legends. I can’t imagine what he must have been thinking or going through the last weeks of his life, particularly as he was always strongly warning us with his art about apocalyptic predictions of our planet and experiencing the pandemic from his home in Montauk where he disappeared in the woods.
Rest In Peace to such an incredible inspiration.
From a Vanity Fair article:
Equally at home in the hippest Manhattan nightclubs and the most remote reaches of the African bush, Beard is forever spouting dire warnings and apocalyptic predictions about the fate of a doomed planet. It is a vision he has always expressed most hauntingly with his work, an extremely eccentric oeuvre that transcends every genre and resembles nothing outside of its creator's fervidly bizarre imagination.
His photo collages were an incredible art form, but personally I was always obsessed and inspired to create diaries like his ( when I was younger and living in New York). A bit more from the Vanity Fair article.
The diary habit began back when Beard and Radziwill were lovers and Jacqueline Onassis gave him a leather-bound journal he proceeded to fill with all manner of debris. Year by year, the diaries piled up, overstuffed volumes grotesquely swollen with the detritus of a life, each page densely layered with photographs and an astonishing assortment of other items: tiny rodent skulls, candy-bar wrappers, keys, buttons, flamingo feathers, a pocket from a pair of velvet jeans, peanut shells, dried leaves, plastic cocktail stirrers, a piece of a cereal box, mysterious newspaper headlines (woman saved from slime!), bones and rocks, smears and dribbles of blood (always Beard's favorite artistic medium), intricate line drawings and elaborately inscribed quotations, cigarette butts, rubber gloves, matchbooks, fish skeletons, plastic ketchup packets, a desiccated lizard, a dung-beetle foot—the variety is endless.
