MAKING ART: A MEMOIR The First Twenty-Five Years

Peter Veres

Paperback:  $65.00 / ISBN-13: 978-1-58790-513-1 / 288 pages / 8.5” x 11”/ llustrated / Color

E-Book: $9.95 / ISBN-13: 978-1-58790-521-6 

History / Popular Culture

ABOUT THE BOOK

Entering 2018, the year I would turn eighty, I decided to review the artworks I have made over all these years and to gather a selection of them in a book of images and commentary. This is the first volume of that project, a memoir in words and pictures of my first 25 years as an artist.

The story begins after World War II finally ended in Budapest in 1945, and as a six-year-old survivor I started my first year in a rebuilt public school. The dozens of school notebooks my mother kept, in an effort to preserve what she could after losing so much during the war, provide the basis for the first section of this book. The many pages I present offer an insight into a form of education — a focus on clarity and skill of penmanship and narrative visual depiction - that I have not seen in America. The images show a young artist developing his visual ideas over a period of four years, at which point my family emigrated from Hungary to America to begin a new life.

The second section follows my life in New York from grade school through college. Thanks again to my mother’s instinct for preservation in a life of impermanence, I was able to draw upon scores of my drawings and other works that she kept in the closets of our small apartment. I comment on these images and include notes and anecdotes and photographs of the life and times of a New York kid in the 1950s.

The final section is of my years in Cambridge, MA, where I went to study with an Italian sculptor and to get a teaching credential at the Harvard School of Education. It includes recollections of a summer trip to Europe, with a long tangential discussion and original analysis of Michelangelo’s last sculpture, the Rondanini Pieta, which made a great impact on me when I saw it in Milan in 1962.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Veres was born in 1938, and lived in Budapest, Hungary until 1949 when, having survived WW II, he and his family emigrated to the US and settled in New York City.  There he went to the High School of Music and Art and Columbia College, graduating in 1961 with a BA and a major in art history.

That same year he married Ruth Cahn and moved to Cambridge, MA, to work with the sculptor Mirko Basaldella at Harvard. He earned an MAT degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and taught art and art history at the Newton College for Women.

In 1963 he moved to Berkeley, CA and taught, until 1978, at the San Francisco College for Women, later called Lone Mountain College. He also taught in the graduate school of San Francisco State College, 1965-1968.

In the Bay Area his work was in sculpture and graphic art.  From 1969 to 1975 he created and performed in his own theater works.  In 1977 he started making mosaics, which he continued until 1999.

In 1978 he moved with his family to Mendocino, CA, where he continued his work in mosaics, mostly for public places.

In 1993 he moved to San Francisco, where he still lives, working mostly in sculpture and making art.

Books by Peter Veres

Kati’s Story: Recollections of Two Worlds

Ephemeral Gestures: Performance Works 1969-1975

Grassroots Drawings 1972-1978

The Argument of Innocence: A Selection From the Arts of Kenneth Patchen