I'm not a painter,
although I almost played one on stage when I sang an opera role where I was in
a few scenes with Cavaradossi working at his easel, the painter who turned
revolutionary and was in love with the beautiful Tosca in Puccini's extravagant
opera. That's probably the closest I've come to the execution of the
visual arts other than fiddling with some watercolors and creating the dingiest
shade of brown ever seen.
So, when I just finished reading Sena Jeter Naslund's latest novel, Fountain of St. James Court; or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman, Mike's latest post about pacing in fiction came to mind as I thought about Sena's novel and what I'd taken from it. The novel is a delightful quodlibet with the "Fountain" portion following the contemporary writer, a woman--a precisely detailed clone of Sena herself, right down to the details of her neighborhood and even her house--who has just finished a solid first draft of her latest novel about another woman, a well known painter who lived through the French Revolution. And yes, they're both old and looking back on their lives, so the "Old Woman" segments are the actual draft of the novel about the painter. Interesting conceit reflecting the interrelatedness of all the arts, another of Sena's favorites. Of course, Sena extends the intertextuality theme and riffs off the Joyce homage and frequently improvs off one of her favorites, Virginia Woolf, with the opening line giving notice by immediately bowing to Mrs. Dalloway.
At any rate, Sena has done her research and a major theme of the work is the way artists--in the broad sense of that word--see the world and practice their art and craft. A fascinating juxtaposition of the visual and the verbal, and their similarities of approach, even when we use different techniques and unique words to describe the concepts.
So, when I just finished reading Sena Jeter Naslund's latest novel, Fountain of St. James Court; or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman, Mike's latest post about pacing in fiction came to mind as I thought about Sena's novel and what I'd taken from it. The novel is a delightful quodlibet with the "Fountain" portion following the contemporary writer, a woman--a precisely detailed clone of Sena herself, right down to the details of her neighborhood and even her house--who has just finished a solid first draft of her latest novel about another woman, a well known painter who lived through the French Revolution. And yes, they're both old and looking back on their lives, so the "Old Woman" segments are the actual draft of the novel about the painter. Interesting conceit reflecting the interrelatedness of all the arts, another of Sena's favorites. Of course, Sena extends the intertextuality theme and riffs off the Joyce homage and frequently improvs off one of her favorites, Virginia Woolf, with the opening line giving notice by immediately bowing to Mrs. Dalloway.
At any rate, Sena has done her research and a major theme of the work is the way artists--in the broad sense of that word--see the world and practice their art and craft. A fascinating juxtaposition of the visual and the verbal, and their similarities of approach, even when we use different techniques and unique words to describe the concepts.
