THE END OF THE GAME
“But past who can recall, or done undo?"
Paradise Lost
"I'LL WRITE WHENEVER I CAN" - PETER BEARD
I recently bought Taschen's two-volume collection of Peter Beard's photos, diaries, and collages. This large-format special edition is based on the original limited collector's edition, which sold out instantly upon publication. It was quite expensive but worth every cent I paid for it. It is a fascinating collection of his work spanning many years.
Peter Beard's most important collages are included in these volumes, along with hundreds of smaller-scale works and diaries, magnified to show every detail - from Beard's meticulous handwriting and old-master-inspired drawings to stones and bones and bits of animals pasted to the page.
Beard has fashioned his life into a work of art as photographer, collector, diarist, and author. He is one of those maniacs, visionaries and wide-eyed dreamers that have fascinated me for a long time. He’s been trampled by an elephant and was declared dead on arrival at a Nairobi hospital. His house in Montauk in the Hamptons was destroyed by fire in 1977 in which he lost twenty years of his own diaries, works by Andy Warhol and personal mementos of the artist Francis Bacon.
He kept illustrated diaries from a young age which evolved into a serious career as an artist and earned him a central position in the international art world. He was painted by Francis Bacon, painted on by Salvador Dali, and made diaries with Andy Warhol. Beard also toured with Truman Capote and the Rolling Stones, created books with Jacqueline Onassis and Mick Jagger - all features in his work.
Warhol described him as - "one of the most fascinating men in the world ...... he's like a modern Tarzan. He jumps in and out of the snake pit he keeps at his home. He cuts himself and paints with the blood. He wears sandals and no socks in the middle of winter. He lived in a parked car on 13th Street for six months. He moved when he woke up and found a transvestite sleeping on the roof."
As a fashion photographer, he took Vogue stars like Veruschka to Africa and brought new ones, most notably Iman , to the United States. Beard also photographed the 2009 edition of the Pirelli calendar. It is more Beard’s photographs of Africa that attracts me than his fashion shoots.
His love affair with natural history and wildlife, which juxtapose most of his work, began when he read the books of Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen). After spending time in Kenya and befriending Dinesen he eventually bought a piece of land which he named “Hog Ranch” near her farm.
BEARD WORKING AT HOG RANCH
It was the early 1960s and the big game hunters led safaris, with all the colonial elements Beard had read about in “Out of Africa” characterizing the open life and landscape, but the times were changing.
“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near the sun.”
“The chief feature of the landscape, and your life in it was the air. Looking back at a sojourn in the African highlands, you are stuck by your feeling of having lived for a time up in the air. The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a hard blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. In the middle of the day the air was alive over the land, like a flame burning; it scintillated, waved and shone like running water, mirrored and doubled all objects, and created great Fata Morgana. Up in this air you breathed easily, drawing a vital assurance, and a lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am where I ought to be.”
No wonder he was seduced by Dinesen’s lyrical writing…
Beard witnessed the dawn of Kenya's population explosion, which put strain on the environment and stressed animal populations especially the starving elephants of Tsavo, dying by the tens of thousands in a wasteland of eaten trees. He documented what he saw - with diaries, photographs, and collages. He published unique and sometimes shocking images in a collection called “The End of the Game” which also forms part of my permanent book collection.
As Carl Jung described Africa;
“I found myself haunted by an impression I myself could not understand. I kept thinking that the land smelled queer, as though the soil was soaked with blood.”
This is what Beard unflinchingly recorded in “The End of the Game”; the rape of Kenya’s wildlife. The corpses are laid bare; the facts are carefully recorded, sometimes in type, often by hand, occasionally with blood.
Peter Beards work is hard to describe as it does not fall into the realms of conventional art photography, painting or mixed media. It is absolutely fascinating, almost organic, with layer upon layer of images, writing, newspaper clippings, blood, bone, paint and god knows what else. There is strange mixture of beauty and cruelty with an underlying core of violence in these images.
This is the work of a very special method-in-the-madness mind. The stream of consciousness at work is depicted in the fascinating documentary “Scrapbooks from Africa and Beyond” about the life and work of Peter Beard released about ten years ago shortly after he was trampled by the elephant. Who would have thought that painting a Landover’s tyres and then driving over the edge of a huge canvas will make a great edging? Peter Beard did. And it’s beautiful.
In my own journals there are collages. My creative efforts border on the mundane as my mind is too organized, tending to put images in boxes. I experience the same mental block when creating mosaics. I tend to place the pieces of cut tile and other objects too close together meaning that the work, although very colourful and striking, doesn’t look spontaneous but stilted. It is the structure, the need for order and systems so necessary in my career hijacking the creativity of the subconscious.
Great art is not always in what the eye observes, but in the blank spaces in between where a deeper self draws its own images on the canvass of the imagination.