FOR PEDER JOHNSON, 16 August 2009

Peder became a friend in 1960, when we were both very hungry at UNH very early one morning. Peder drove the two of us the 65 miles from Durham to my parents’ house in Franklin. My father, awakened by my knocking, opened the door and asked, “What the hell are you doing here this time of night?

My father understood right away, though, about our being hungry. After all, like all our parents: he had lived through the Great Depression. He just told us to be quiet, eat what we wanters and turn out the lights when we left. We ate quietly, eggs and bacon and cheese and toast and jam. Peder loved to eat good food. I have no idea what we talked about going back and forth to Durham. Knowing Peder, though, there wasn't too much talking. That suited me fine.

Later, in the l970s, Peder and Peggy often put me and sometimes Heather up in their mountain-top house, when Annie and Lisa were pretty small and Rammy the goat ruled the yard. Peder painted some but mostly we sanded the driveway or played endless dart games in the studio. Peder usually won. I do remember him struggling with what I think was his first landscape---it was a scene out the window of what the rest of us ended up calling the Scissors painting: “ How do the trees get connected to the ground?'' He figured it out soon enough. I don't know if either Peder or Peggy realized they were saving my life.

By the 1980s, both Ann and I had real jobs. The company I worked for in Harvard Square bought a big painting of Peder's I could see every day at work. A senior MP commissioned Peder to paint some big canvases from an apartment he had in South Boston. Others at work also bought his stuff. He was a hit where I worked, and I was very proud to know Peder, a proud, talented, committed, and determined artist among us.

We lost direct touch with Peder when we moved to London in 1991. We did get an occasional letter with a couple of prints of his latest work. And one painting or another of Peder’s is in every photograph we took of ourselves and our friends in the flats where we lived in those years abroad.

I regret not reconnecting with Peder in earnest when we came back to the States in 2004. But Peder traveled all over the place, both physically and mentally. It was always hard to know where he was.

Peder did leave a legacy. He left a lot of art for us to ponder. The painting here, Beard Brook, is one of my favorites. I hope you will look at it today. I’ve said to others, but really wanted to say to Peder: “This is as good as any painting of its kind I have seen anywhere in the world.”

We will always miss him, but Peder is still with us.

Sid Seamans