Several of the characters in my debut novel, This Is How I Find Her, are artists. Sophie, the narrator, gets her love of art from her mother, who is an artist by profession. Sophie considers everything that happens in her life with an artist's eye, stepping back and framing moments as paintings or photographs. And she makes friends with a classmate, Natalie, partly through their shared love of art.
My own artistic ability stopped at stick figures, and my knowledge of artists and art history isn't much more advanced than that. So one of my favorite aspects of researching the book was trying to figure out what kinds of art and which artists my characters would like -- the research had the bonus of exposing me to some artists I'd never heard of before.
The artists who Amy, Sophie's mother, loves are also the artists with whom I was already most familiar, like Picasso, Matisse, and Marc Chagall.
Sophie prefers art that's more abstract, more geometric. She likes the shapes and colors of Piet Mondrian's work, paintings like Kandinsky's On White II, and some of the work of Joan Miro. While hunting for art for Sophie I also discovered all kinds of fun abstract sculptures (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sequin/SCULPTS/LONGHURST/ and http://helasculpt.com/gallery/) that seemed like the perfect match for Sophie's talents in math and art.
My own artistic tastes, it turns out, are most like those of another character, Natalie. Natalie, a classmate of Sophie's and eventually a friend, is a photographer. In one scene, she invites Sophie to help her with a photography project that involves people using ordinary, everyday objects in an otherwise rundown house:
"I end up in the living room with Zach, unfolding a rug and laying out a toy train track while he sets out a photo in a frame and tapes a curtain-like piece of cream-colored fabric to the window frame. The fake curtain flutters when a breeze blows through the broken window, and the effect is spooky."
I didn't discover the work of Rineke Djikstra until after I'd finished writing This Is How I Find Her. And as I walked through an exhibition of her work, I didn't just love it for myself -- I also found myself thinking, as if Natalie were a friend of mine, "Oh, Natalie would love this."
My own artistic tastes, it turns out, are most like those of another character, Natalie. Natalie, a classmate of Sophie's and eventually a friend, is a photographer. In one scene, she invites Sophie to help her with a photography project that involves people using ordinary, everyday objects in an otherwise rundown house:
"I end up in the living room with Zach, unfolding a rug and laying out a toy train track while he sets out a photo in a frame and tapes a curtain-like piece of cream-colored fabric to the window frame. The fake curtain flutters when a breeze blows through the broken window, and the effect is spooky."
I didn't discover the work of Rineke Djikstra until after I'd finished writing This Is How I Find Her. And as I walked through an exhibition of her work, I didn't just love it for myself -- I also found myself thinking, as if Natalie were a friend of mine, "Oh, Natalie would love this."
Giveaway
Buy This Is How I Find Her
Albert Whitman
Visit The Book Cellar tomorrow for the next spot on the tour!
Albert Whitman
Visit The Book Cellar tomorrow for the next spot on the tour!
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