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In his book, The Smile at the Heart of Things, Brian H. Peterson decided to write about his soul and how creativity takes hold of the life of an artist. Listen in to this personal, poignat, and somewhat humorous conversation accounting the ups and downs of his life. Click below: Brian H. Peterson featured on NPR's This I Believe

Meet Barbara Bonfigli, author of Café Tempest: Adventures on a Small Greek Island at the New York Times Travel Show - Greek National Tourism Booth - Friday-Sunday February 26th - 28th. Ms. Bonfigli will present her book, screen Greek travel tip videos, and introduce the Tempestini - the world’s first retsina cocktail. Click below for more info.

Brian Peterson, author of The Smile at the Heart of Things published by Tell Me Press featured in the December 30, 2009 edition of  USA Today. Click here to read the article.

The Smile at the Heart of Things:
Essays and Life Stories
by Brian H. Peterson

January 2010
ISBN- 13: 978-0-9819835-5-4
ISBN-10: 0-9819835-5-3
$28.95 US ($34.95 Canada)
247 pages
hardcover limited edition, 7 x 10 inches
47 black-and-white and full-color photos

 

Inside this book

What are the essential ingredients of a creative life? How does an artist become an artist? Can art and religion find common ground? What does it mean to be an individual, and as individuals can we be separate and singular as well as communal and connected?

Brian H. Peterson wrestles with these questions and offers some answers in The Smile at the Heart of Things, a wide-ranging and deeply satisfying collection of personal essays, journal entries, and reflections on art, artists, and art museums. Drawing on his experiences as a musician, visual artist, scholar, and museum curator, Peterson connects his own search for growth and meaning with larger issues of creativity and the human spirit, often by simply telling stories about his own life and the lives of artists, friends, and family members.

Forty-seven full-color images of well-known paintings and photographs enrich these stories and underscore their celebration of humor and sadness, grief and joy.

Praise for Brian H. Peterson’s work:

“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

meet the author

Brian H. Peterson

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 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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