Susan Vreeland
Susan Vreeland
Susan Vreeland is an American author. Several of her books deal with the relationship between art and fiction. The Passion of Artemisia is a fictionalised investigation of some aspects of the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, while The Girl in Hyacinth Blue centres round an imaginary painting by Vermeer. The Forest Lover is a fictionalised account of the life of the Canadian painter Emily Carr...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth20 January 1946
CountryUnited States of America
When I think how art education is eliminated whenever we get a budget crunch in the schools, I have to stand up and say that even when there was dire poverty ten blocks away from Tiffany Studios in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was art and creativity within.
I ventured into fiction in 1988 with 'What Love Sees,' a biographical novel of a woman's unwavering determination to lead a full life despite blindness.
Each time we enter imaginatively into the life of another, it's a small step upwards in the elevation of the human race.
Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.
The Tiffany lamp is an American icon bridging the immigrants, settlement houses, and the slums of the Lower East Side and the wealthy industrialists of upper Manhattan, the Gilded Age and its excesses.
I would like to bring people who have never been to a museum into a museum. And I would like to bring museum goers into libraries. I think there ought to be this cross-fertilization.
To feel the grace of God in a painting of the dear, quiet commonness of a domestic interior, or in a landscape, seascape, cityscape, trains us to feel the grace of God in the thing itself in situ.
When I learned that near Roussillon there were ochre quarries and mines from which was extracted the ore which produced pigments in all the warm hues of the color wheel, I had a substantial artistic link to this region beyond mere love.
'Luncheon of the Boating Party,' owned by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., has served Americans as a symbol of France and French culture, both of which I love, and is as evocative and triumphant an image as that other emissary of France, the Statue of Liberty.
To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.
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.
When I see Tiffany windows in churches across the United States, I get a sense of spiritual upliftment from that.
Two of my grandfathers had been artists, lifelong oil painters, so I was exposed to art very young. I've always been interested in it, although I never pursued it as a career or even as an avocation.
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!