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
'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.
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.
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.
I'm hoping that I make readers into museum goers and museum goers into readers.
I don't know if a historian or scholar owns an opinion.
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.
Color has always been important to me, ever since my first deluxe box of Crayolas.
It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting.