Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Amazing, being in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, 16
 gorgeous days when even the cellphone does not work -- you know, as in, you can call friends and husband and all that -- and you just might have email IF you are lucky and in your studio, where you
hole away directly whenever you can...
If I were (oh, that would be delightful, but am not) a fiction writer, I'd call something
No Signal from the Mountain
because THAT is where the only power comes from, very remarkable
what is more so is being
Surrounded by truly non-ego driven creative types -- my goodness, I did love being at the Getty for 8 months and at Bellagio twice, and once again for a conference, but this is different: cows, horses,
and that is it
trying to write a memoir (not a momoir, as in being a mother, but a plain old memoir) of and in the voice of my grandmother the painter
what alife: Worpswede, where she had a rather delightful time with Otto Modersohn, the widower of Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died in childbirth a year afteer my grandmother arrrived -- she lived with my grandfather and 3 children in Bremen, 15 kilometers away... and had left her first baby with a nurse and her husband to go study at the Academie Julian back at the end of the nineteenth century,
for 6 months, with a friend painter from Savannah, but still, all that and then settling down in the then small town of Wilmington, N.C., rising at 5 every morning to paint and then being a society hostess...
WHOA!
So how to write in someone else's voice... I am of course reading painter Paula's journal, and hope to find journals of other woman painters,and here are some right around me now...

1 comment:

Kurt said...

What an enticing story, your grandma! Have fun at VCCA.