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
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.
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.
I'm hoping that I make readers into museum goers and museum goers into readers.
I wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive in my heart.
The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.
To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.
Each time we enter imaginatively into the life of another, it's a small step upwards in the elevation of the human race.
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.
After one hundred days of confinement following a bone marrow transplant, I rejoiced in taking short walks to a nearby park as I was writing 'Girl in Hyacinth Blue.' The uncertainty of my survival made every blade of grass gorgeous in its green intensity, lifting itself up, doing its part to make the world beautiful.
Art history looks at art works and the people who have created them.
Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion.
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.
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.
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.