Water Music Solos are a sub-series of small prints drawn from Peter Dušek’s large Water Music series. Typically 11 × 11 inches, they are produced in limited editions of 9 + 1 artist’s proof. Many are printed on Hahnemühle rice paper, whose delicate fibre and subtle tooth lend the images an organic warmth and quiet tactility, as though the paper itself were still holding a memory of water.
Instead of the large symphonies of the main Water Music series, the Solos are single instruments, expressing themselves as photographs of the sun and wind moving across water. Yet pure randomness can suddenly look intentional. Each print is an invitation to participate in that act of recognition. A single glance is never enough; these images ask for time—quiet, unhurried looking with an open mind—and reward those who linger. Only when the viewer slows down and keeps looking does the imagination begin to move freely, shifting and reshaping what first appeared as mere abstraction into something alive with personal meaning. One person may see a face, another a rabbit, bird or fish, another a tree with the moon above at night, another simply the raw energy of light made visible. The image remains open, democratic, unfinished until someone stands before it and decides what story the water is telling. The water is doing nothing more than obeying physics, yet the human eye, hungry for narrative, keeps finding legible forms.
In this way, the Water Music Solos are less about depicting water than about rehearsing a very old human habit: looking at the random and discovering significance. The sun and wind supply the paintbrush, the water is the canvas, and perception supplies the music.
