Susan Vreeland: Living in the Spirit of Art

A funny thing happened on Susan Vreeland‘s way through lymphoma. After narrowing Vreeland’s focus to the bare essentials of living and dying, the experience opened her horizons to the “beauty and soulfulness” of art. Suddenly a woman with a mission, Vreeland surrounded herself with art books and let the wonder she found there draw her back to balance and harmony. Ultimately, the hundreds of artists, paintings and sculptures she read about set the course for the next stage of her life’s journey.

Vreeland’s creative purpose veered from the classroom and short story writing to novels that related art to everyday people. The combination magnified the subjects’ lives and touched readers, turning the first novel she wrote after her hospital stay, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, into a bestseller. Vreeland’s latest release, The Passions of Artemisia, takes readers on a tour of the world of 17th century art as seen through the eyes of a young woman, Artemisia Gentileschi, who would become one of its most controversial painters. Art plays a prominent role in Vreeland’s upcoming projects too.

Crescent Blues: You obviously feel drawn to art and artists. What do you think is the source of the connection?

Susan Vreeland: I’ve had artists in my distant family, grandparents, great grandparents, and have lived with their work — oil paintings, watercolors, lithographs for children’s books, pieces of china, — since childhood. Likewise, crafts have always interested me. That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains.

In the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I was once drawn to a small Phoenician glass medicine pitcher, luminous pale yellow-green with a rounded belly and a long, curved snout of a spout. It was made in the second century. People rose in my imagination, as they did for Keats when contemplating the Grecian Urn — the mother of a sick child who let a few drops fall from the spout onto her child’s tongue; the glassblower who might have seen a similarly shaped animal the morning he made it. Did it rain that day, or was the sun scorching his back while he worked? Was his community at peace or war? In want or plenty? Did he see the thing he made valued by others? Certainly he could not have imagined its longevity or the world it now inhabits. Glass! Countless hands had held it. For it to have survived undamaged for eighteen hundred years moved me with awe and tenderness.

Likewise, paintings, especially those with people, move me the same way, and feed my imagination. Who sat as model for the artist? What was their relationship? Was the painter sick with dread over how he would feed his family? What did his children want from him that day? Was his wife happy? Was he? Was he contented with his work? Writing art-related fiction has been a way for me, a non-painter though a ceramicist, to enter into the world of painting.

You asked the question in Girl in Hyacinth Blue, let me ask it concerning The Passion of Artemisia. What does The Passion of Artemisia suggest about the value (personal and monetary), function and purpose of art?

While undergoing treatment for lymphoma, spending a great deal of time in solitude, I found great comfort in looking at art books. I was uplifted by hundreds of paintings and sculptures, not only by their beauty but by their soulfulness. In The Passion of Artemisia, I have Artemisia say, “That’s what great art is supposed to do — help us to live in the spirit and die at peace.” I felt this myself at the time of my illness. The biblical passage used in the Magnificat, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” seems particularly applicable to artists whose work has made me pay more attention to God’s creation and marvel at the beauties in the real world as well as those of canvas and stone.

Tell us about your research for The Passion of Artemisia.

Oh, the joy of research! Far more than art historical research relating to Artemisia and Orazio was necessary in writing Passion. I had to learn about other paintings and sculptures, about the Medici family, Galileo, marriage customs, food, transportation, the layout of palaces, cities, gardens, piazzas, the interiors of certain churches. Still lifes and figure paintings helped with food and clothing. When dealing with locales as old and well known as Rome and Florence, I had to ascertain whether certain streets, architectural features, sculptures, and paintings were in the same place as they are today. Only a chance reference told me that La Scalinata, later dubbed the Spanish Steps, up to Santa Trinità dei Monti weren’t yet built at the time Artemisia climbed the Pincian Hill. With permission of the Mother Superior of the Religeuse of the Sacred Heart at Santa Trinità, I moved the time forward that Santa Trinità was a convent of nuns rather than a monastery for brethren.

Sometimes nothing can be depended upon other than being there. I stayed in the convent of Santa Trinità in Rome to understand its layout and feel its calm in a bustling city, and I climbed the bell tower in Florence not just to see the view Artemisia and Pietro would have seen, but to describe the stairwell. Those on-site experiences are the treat of research. In truth, all of the research was enjoyable for me because I felt it directing me and giving the book depth and authority.

How were you affected by walking where Artemisia walked?

When I walked where Artemisia walked, a great flood of feeling came over me. How many millions of feet had walked the Lungarno where she lived, yet mine carried me, a person bearing a special need to smell the Arno, watch the ripples on its diagonal dam. I was alone in Florence yet not alone. I had her.

You took some literary liberties with the facts surrounding Artemisia’s life. For example she had two children, not just one daughter. Do you feel this deviation from the truth may cause readers to question other fundamental truths?

In writing historical fiction, one must first find the story one wishes to tell buried in the known history. Then, one must be willing to risk criticism when that story requires departure from fact. Writing historically based fiction is first a matter of discovery, then focus, then selectivity. My chosen focus was the inner life of Artemisia, her developing state of mind, her transcendence over misfortune and resentment, the possibilities of forgiveness and love in a ruptured life. I couldn’t go off on a tangent just because I found research about other issues

A person’s real life involves a huge number of people, far too many to give focus to a novel. In order to avoid the narrative sprawl that would limit space for development of important characters and relationships relevant to my themes, I had to eliminate Artemisia’s brothers, sons and many of the people for whom she painted in order to reveal her relationships with her father, husband and daughter more deeply.

Conversely, archival and published history doesn’t always record the relationships that are significant or intimate, so characters have to be invented to allow the subject to reveal intimate thoughts and feelings through interaction. For this purpose I invented the two nuns, Artemisia’s models, her neighbor Fina, and Renata, her chambermaid.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf says women’s history “has to be invented — both discovered and made up.” This is the process by which an historic figure moves from yellowed archives to academic interest and from scholarship to heroic popular legend, becoming more complex and beloved as a result. I wanted to participate in giving Artemisia her moment in the popular or mainstream culture, to bring her to a wider readership through fiction than what scholarly biography is likely to do. For this reason, I was true to fact only so long as fact furnished believable drama, in the hope that what I produced would be concordant with the soul and passions of the real Artemisia Gentileschi, for whom the story behind the art was always vital. For readers to whom it matters that I eliminated her sons and brothers, that I had her writing letters at a younger age, that I ignored her brothers, that she didn’t actually live in Genoa though her paintings did, I suggest they read a biography.

What does your art — your writing — say about Susan Vreeland the writer? The woman?

This question seems to be asking me to do what the work itself must do for the reader. I hope my writing shows an appreciation for courage, beauty, individual vision and artistic skill, art in the service of spirit and the higher sentiments, desire and sacrifice in the service of art. I hope it demonstrates my love for color, the commonplace but often overlooked detail, finely tuned language, and the reflective moment.

Do you consider yourself a feminist?

No, I don’t consider myself a feminist writer if by that you mean that my chosen themes have an agenda of political or social gender equality. I am drawn to female characters, probably by an easier accessibility to the female mind, but I never want to limit myself to them. I am working now on a historical novel about the Canadian painter Emily Carr, but if she had been a man, I think I’d be writing about her anyway, for the non-gender themes her story offers. My short stories quite often have male protagonists. As for Artemisia, the fact of her gender is central to her story, but her story is not simply a woman’s story.

Inquiring into what state of mind is most propitious for creative work, Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One’s Own that, “the mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, like Shakespeare’s mind.” This interested me as a writer as well as an appreciator of the visual arts. Woolf goes on to say, regarding Shakespeare, “All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore, his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded.” This rather scorns as too limited any gender agenda as a source for art, don’t you think?

Nevertheless, I wondered, what of a woman (or a man) who had plenty of reasons for grievance? How was she to set it aside to give birth, whole and unstained, to the work she was capable of achieving? Or, could the circumstances of her life serve a creative purpose? Could her passions be used, or must they be repressed in order to produce good work? These are the questions I sought to answer by my reflection on her life and work. Perhaps fortunately for us, Artemisia didn’t read Virginia Woolf, which is to say that her paintings of strong heroines, particularly the Judith paintings and her Susanna and the Elders painted at 17, the year she was raped, did serve as her personal expression in relation to the events in her young life. But her story and her art transcended that.

As for the historic record of her feelings of her own womanhood, two sentences from two letters to a patron provide evidence. In sending a finished painting to a patron, she includes in the accompanying note, “This will show what a woman can do.” And in another letter, “You will find the heart of Caesar in the soul of this woman.” I chose not to include these sentences in the novel, feeling that they were too much. I’d been warned by Virginia Woolf of the diminishment of a piece of literature by its too strict service to a political agenda, feminist or otherwise.

Now that your book is out, survived the comparison to Girl in Hyacinth Blue, what next?

Oh, I’m working on two books at once, not that I intended it that way. The novel, Cedar Spirit, I alluded to earlier. Early twentieth century Canadian artist Emily Carr was a true original. Native people of British Columbia whose totems and villages she painted knew her as Klee Wyck, The Laughing One. Although a few chapters take place in Paris in 1911, the setting is a big departure for me — wilderness! Her story allows me to explore issues of cross-cultural friendship, native spirituality, and the interrelatedness of nature, man, and God.

The other is a short story collection which conveys imaginary snippets of the lives of painters as experienced by a “familiar” — a person other than the artist who is living his or her own story against the backdrop of a short time in the artist’s life. For example, Monet as seen by his gardener at Giverny; Cezanne from the point of view of a little boy who throws stones at him and his easel, then must rebuild his garden wall in penance; Van Gogh as an influence in the life of the postman’s son in Arles just before he joins the French Foreign Legion. The peasant family in Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters comes to life and copes — or fails to cope — with another mouth to feed. Eduard Manet’s longsuffering wife puts up with his numerous affairs with models, nurses him in illness, and attempts to determine which of his models gave him syphilis. The second part of this book, divided between “Then” and “Now,” consists of contemporary stories with purely fictional characters.

What books and authors have most influenced you?

I cherish certain parts of books by many authors and for a variety of reasons:

For the ability to draw me into an unfamiliar world and make me care deeply about its people, for making a bland, socially inept bungler sympathetic and appealing, The Shipping News by Annie Proulx.
For lush sensuousness of scene under the cedar between innocent youth on the brink of the moral eruption of their heretofore unmarked lives, and for twists of plot, Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson.
For natural and transparent expression of emotion, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
For seemingly effortless, rolling description allowing me to see a moving, peopled landscape, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.
For the power to create loveable characters I want to throw my arms around, and honorable ones I want to emulate, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
For sophistication and complexity of narrative structure, for subtle connective tissue, and for sheer beauty of sentences, The Hours by Michael Cunningham.
For density, language, cumulative imagery, and new discoveries every time I read it, Hamlet.
For the pure joy of storytelling, John Steinbeck.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

You may find something in the “On Writing” page of my website.

Why did you choose to write about Artemisia Gentileschi?

While Vermeer’s luminous art drew me into his life story, it was the opposite with Artemisia. Her life story drew me to appreciate her art. I appreciated her bravery first. At every point in her life where she had to make a choice, she followed the route that demanded the most courage. Also, the message her story tells us about transcendence over what life or circumstances might hand us is one we need to hear in every age. If one looks at life and history from the standpoint that there is some good, even unlimited good, that can be realized in any bad experience, then one sees that out of Artemisia’s rape and suffering came not only some stupendous paintings but groundbreaking advancements for women, a different view of heroine stories which has dislodged assumptions, and an example and inspiration for Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo, Kathe Kollwitz, Emily Carr and countless more unnamable.

Dawn Goldsmith

A multi-published writer of non-fiction and short stories, Dawn Goldsmith also reviews mass market books for Publishers Weekly and writes for a variety of publications including Christian Science Monitor.

Learn more about Susan Vreeland.

Susan Vreeland: Living in the Spirit of Art

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