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Art in My Life and Stories

Why Art and Artists? My time travel novels often feature art and artists—you may wonder why. It’s because I grew up with an artist father who painted constantly and invited many artist friends to our home. He took us to working studios, local art exhibitions, and art museums in the Los Angeles area. The smell of oil paint and turpentine evokes childhood memories. Saturday afternoons, watching my father mix oil paints and dash paint onto…

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Notating Nature’s Delicate Song

The evanescence in British artist Andy Goldworthy‘s work is what first caught hold of me. (Click the link for Artsy’s wonderful Goldsworthy pages.) He works with nature to make sculptures of the moment, or perhaps the hour, using all natural elements. Ice, water, leaves, twigs, wind, rain are the easel, palette, paints, and media he sculpts with. It’s as if he’s having a conversation with nature and time, an intense wrestling almost. His work seems…

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My brother’s art and service created a beautiful life

This week I lost my dearest brother, David Abramson, one of the kindest, gentlest people I will ever know. Sixty-four years was not nearly enough to be connected, so I’m sure we’ll meet again in the next rooms of existence. Among the several arts he pursued — visual and culinary as well — was the bliss of making music. He wrote songs, he led several bands, and he was always learning more about his craft.…

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Tales of Weird Families & Other Quirky Groups of Humans

My interest in this kind of story could be defined as obsessive. What can be more obsessive than something you’ve lost or something you feel you never completely had? Novels about families and other groups fascinate me because my family never quite cohered and split apart pretty fast. So I read to replace it with a better family, though my secret wish is to see that all families or groups of closely connected people have…

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Happily buried in the Italian Renaissance

I’m coming down the home stretch (= two-thirds through) of what I sincerely hope is the final revision of my time travel novel, The Renaissance Club. I’m past fallen-in-love with Gianlorenzo Bernini — I’m in the forming-a-fan-club stage. If only for this sculpture of Apollo and Daphne, made early in his magnificent career as a sculptor. He was also the official architect of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome under two popes.  When I say buried…

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Time Traveling in Italy

Today I’m working on my time travel novel set in Renaissance and present-day Italy, featuring the genius sculptor and architect who invented The Baroque style, Gianlorenzo Bernini. Of this sumptuous sculpture of Bernini’s beloved, Costanza Piccolomini, art historian Jonathan Jones wrote: “He has made an intimate monument to secret moments, a sculpted memento of his lover, whose marble reality dissolves, when you chance on her among the stony dead, into breath, life. Bernini’s genius for…

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Metaphor Monday

The only way to sanely start a week, if you’re a poet, is with metaphor. Reading to start and revising is the juice. I have three inches of print drafts to plow through, how many e-files, and am grabbing summer by the shorthairs to make a space for poetry. I need to make a fresh pile of worked-up stuff, need time and peace. Hedging my priorities. Here’s one from Gods of Water and Air. Have…

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Stalking a 17th Century Genius

Gianlorenzo Bernini Sculpting in Clay I’m writing a story about a 17th century artist and a 21st century art historian meeting, and the big question is, what does he have to say to her, and what does she have to say to him? My main character has done her Master’s thesis on the sculptor/architect and meets him in person in St. Peter’s basilica, thanks to a magic time-shifting gold pen. Is she kind of his…

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Afternoon with Monet

Lovely day here, the breezy and brilliant kind of spring day I imagined from Monet’s painting, after which I wrote my poem. The traveling exhibition “Monet in Normandy” visited the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco some years ago and it inspired me to write back to several of the paintings. Bought the book too, so I can keep talking back to Monet — or rather, asking questions, as in this poem. Do you ever talk…

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Confession Time

Writing a Poem with Monet It’s April and I’m growing green, but bills cover my desk. The money in my check book dazzles like the mineral caves carved by the surf at Pourville, where Monet stood at his easel to paint thundering waves. I sign my check in the lower right as artists will, re-total the balance and turn up a new one. Diamonds a mile down in Monet’s sea crack, chip, and erode. A…

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