Not many artists in the Upper Valley can claim to draw inspiration from both the landscapes of northern New England and the bustling towns of southern India, but Bruce Peck divides his time between East Topsham, Vt., where he lives with his wife, Ann, and Kodaikanal in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Peck, whose show of etchings of New England and India is currently on view at Long River Galleries and Gifts in Lyme, spends May through early January in East Topsham, where he makes etchings of Vermont’s forests and fields. In January he and his wife head for India, where he grew up as the son of American Baptist missionaries. From 1960 to 1968, Peck attended a boarding school for international students in Kodaikanal, starting as a fourth grade student and going all the way through high school.

Kodaikanal, at an elevation of some 7,000 feet, is what the British and American colonial settlers called a hill station, a town where Westerners went to escape both the heat of the Indian summers, and such tropical diseases as malaria.

Peck, who tends to focus on solitary landscapes while he’s in the Upper Valley, switches gears when he is in India.

“It’s hard to be anywhere you don’t see people,” Peck said, in an interview at Long River Galleries. By contrast, he added, “I haven’t felt inclined to depict American street life.”

His Indian scenes burst with color and activity: people going to market, selling vegetables from carts, fishermen on the coast pulling in nets, or stopping in before work at one of the numerous ancient temples in Tamil Nadu, where they seek blessings and good fortune.

In one etching Peck depicts an elephant standing by the entrance to the Hindu temple of Brihadeeswara in the city of Thanjavur, which is dedicated to the god Shiva. Devotees come to receive the blessing of the elephant, which touches its trunk to a person’s head.

Peck does his etchings in black-and-white, and then hand paints them with watercolors, which gives his work a delicate translucency, whether they’re scenes evoking an austere New England winter or the fecundity of India. As a child growing up in India and the U.S., he felt he came from a third culture.

“You don’t really feel you belong to either one,” he said. “Or you feel you belong to both.”

In Peck’s case, the latter seems the more likely.

source: vnews