notanotherbookreview

I am a lover of landscapes. I have painted them in oils, watercolors, pastels, colored pencils, ink, even collage and the results vary with mood and the weather--often the same.  I have spent many hours in the same place at the same time. Losing myself in a scene is essential, whether finished from a photo later or not. I've been told that losing awareness of time and self, while completely focused on an external scene is outward meditation. Whatever you call it. Landscape artists often exchange knowing looks about how good it feels to paint nature, especially outside. When a friend told me she had a photograph in Las Laguna Gallery's landscape show, I was curious about the work. Here were landscapes, seascapes, dreamscapes in paint, acrylic, wax, pastel, gauche, prints, pottery, photographs, (digital prints, silverpoint and images mixed with paint.). Whether literal or abstract, engineered or imagined ,work seemed to glory less in human perception than the unknowable mystery ...

The mothers of famous artists  are often ignored in a myth-making process that assumes artists are completely self-invented creatures. Probably Freud's theories contributed to the infamy of mothers, yet there's evidence women transmit the gene for intelligence to their sons (for daughters it's a split gene). In THE MARRIAGE OF OPPOSITES, Alice Hoffman shows how a son's genius arose from his mother's transformative journey. It is late in this mythic story, when you realize Camille Pissarro is the son most like Rachel, his mother. She's an old lady in 1807 in Paris, when she begins her narrative about her life on the island of St. Thomas. Her family came to the island, as did their small Jewish community, because the King of Denmark proclaimed freedom of religion for all on St, Thomas and gave Jews civil rights. After 300 years of his family's expulsions from countries, her father finally found a haven. The story Rachel learned, was that he owed his lif...