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There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

- Susan Vreeland
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Author:
Susan Vreeland
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World
Past
Healing
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Archival and published history does not always record personal relationships of historical figures, so characters must be invented to allow the subject to reveal their interior realm through intimate interaction.

I made my personal discovery of Emily Carr while visiting Victoria in 1981 to write a travel article. Immediately, her strong colors attracted me; her spunk fascinated me. Her down-to-earth voice in her writing appealed to me as authentic and original.

For a century, everyone assumed that the iconic Tiffany lamps were conceived and designed by that American master of stained glass. Not so! It was a woman!

It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting.

As New York careens toward the modernity of the twentieth century when Gibson girls were transforming themselves into working women, Clara Driscoll enters the male field of stained glass artistry and builds a lively, multi-national, multi-class women's department within Tiffany Studios.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

When I was nine, my great grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper.

Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds.

I pored over art books and absorbed the placidness of Monet's garden, the sparkling color of the Impressionists, the strength and solidity of Michelangelo's figures showing the titanic power of humans at one with God, Jan Vermeer's serene Dutch women bathed in gorgeous honey-colored light... My conviction grew that art was stronger than death.

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There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.