Turning Leaves and other lovely things

November 26, 2012 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

Just got back from Writescape’s Turning Leaves retreat at Fern Resort. What a gift to spend a weekend with old friends and new, writers all, concentrating on projects and the writer’s craft. I learned valuable lessons in characterization, especially the Sunday morning session with Gwynn Scheltema and Ruth E. Walker.

Back home, it’s Monday, snow is falling and the carryover from the weekend had me spending it on my work-in-progress. The voices of my characters are distinct and clear in my head, less so on paper(or the computer screen).

I just started reading Russ King’s Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven. A giant Black Willow at the river’s edge, the black water, dotted with a gaggle of Canada Geese who seem to be practicing take-off and landing this morning while working on their group harmony, ice forming, and in the distance a row of white—seagulls resting on a half-submerged log— turn the view from my kitchen window into a Group of Seven landscape.

I’ve started “pinning” to a few boards on Pinterest, a process I didn’t understand until recently. Several writers I know are using it as a sort of giant white board, pinning portions of their wip or research or clippings, to private boards. I am using one for clippings, but the rest to collect and share books and paintings and photographs that I especially like. http://pinterest.com/virginiawinters.

A true tragedy this: the mayor brought down by his fatal flaw, his apparent inability to understand that the rules apply to him.

Book Review: The Judgement of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that gave the World Impressionism

November 19, 2012 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

I’ve just finished reading Ross King’s The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (2006). The painters of Impressionism had always interested me, so I was happy to find a writer who placed them in their world, and explained the influences that shaped their work. Ross King does that in a very readable book. My only quibble is with the dearth of coloured plates. Expensive, I know, but I wanted to see more.

The most interesting personality King reveals is that of Meisonnier, a painter, obscure until he began to play a role in King’s book, but a giant in French 19th century art. King contrasts his story, one of success and riches, of obsessive painting and repainting, of intense research into such unlikely subjects as equine locomotion—at one time he built a small railroad on his property and used it to make hundreds of drawings of horses as they ran alongside— with that of the Impressionists, obsessed with light and colour and painting in the open air, and catching the fleeting beauty of a sunrise or a day in the park. Meissonier emerges from King’s pages as a fully realized character, with all his flaws and genius.

King writes so well, I was disappointed when he, or rather events, ended the story with the last Impressionist exhibition. He has gone on to write about The Group of Seven in Defiant Spirits, and more recently Leonardo and the Last Supper, the latter winning him his second Governor General Award. The first was for The Judgement of Paris. Defiant Spirits is next on my list.

Interest in art history has led me to The Great Courses, and Professor Richard Brettell, teaching From Monet to Van Gogh: A History of Impressionism, an audio-visual course, and excellent companion to King’s book.

Devestation

November 1, 2012November 2, 2012 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

The shattered homes, the broken lives, the deaths, all of it seen through the eyes of CNN or CBC, all of it, because of the media, through no fault of its own, seeming more like a movie than reality. Ot at least it did until the pictures and interviews from the destroyed neighbourhoods, where one woman, whose home was inundated, whose son who lived in her basement lost everything, talked about her neighbours on the streets to the south being so much worse off than she was. Two small children found today, I understand. The water ripped them from their mother’s arms. A heart-wrenching tragedy among so many.

I heard today that the Hydro crews from Ontario and Quebec and the Maritimes were arriving in the areas without power. A brotherhood seems to prevail amongst the electrical workers, the firemen who fight the forest fires, the carpenters who rebuild the homes. I’m glad the workers went south. The Americans are generous in other people’s disaster. Time to help them out.

I hope the Americans elect a man with a heart on Tuesday, not the man whose only interest is in the bottom line

Home from the Holiday

November 1, 2012November 1, 2012 / ginny200 / Leave a comment

We have been back from Italy for about a month now. Back to fall settling in, leaves scarlet and yellow and orange, the grass still vivid green, the sky that vibrant, impossible blue, to a garden that needs to be put to bed, and a dog that had given us up as lost.

We spent a week in Venice, staying in an apartment in Castello, one of the sestiere or districts of the city. Castello is off in the east of the city, a workday world for Venetians and a few tourists, but not many since the Biennale ended.

Via Giuseppe Garibaldi was a canal until Napoleon conquered the city and thought it would be more efficient as a street, and so it was filled in and is now one of the few wide streets in the city. But no cars. The only noise at night comes from the bar down below and it ends early as the locals have to get up for bed next day.

There is a Canadian connection on the street. The house on the corner, where the street meets the Riva, was owned by John Cabot. A plaque placed there by the Province of Newfoundland, marks the event. Another by the city of Venice recognizes further explorations to Paraguay by Sebastian Cabot.