Palmira. Sheβs like an apparition floating unknowingly into her future,' I said. 'Here for too brief a time.
I came to see that knowing what love isn't might be just as valuable, though infinitely less satisfying, as knowing what it is.
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.
Art history looks at art works and the people who have created them.
To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.
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.
I absorbed as many Impressionist paintings as I could, in Parisian museums and in many museums in the United States and in books, looking for clues to architecture, clothing, settings.
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.
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.
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.
Each time we enter imaginatively into the life of another, it's a small step upwards in the elevation of the human race.
Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle did more to emancipate women than any other single thing. The bicycle was linked in the psyches of women at that time as a symbol of practical emancipation. Women could go places, wear their skirts shorter to manage the bicycle, and be independent.
'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.
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.
I wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive in my heart.
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.
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.
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!
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.
