Tag Archives: Excerpt

“Of course she does,” Stavros said. “I looked her up. They haven’t found any of them,” She didn’t want to say aloud what she could all too easily imagine: she would die, and they would dismantle that tiny apartment, and … Continue reading →

It was a shame there was nobody alive with that kind of spirit, she thought, but then Victorine and she wouldn’t understand each other. Only in paint and canvas. She read French, but spoke it excecrably. (And that was just … Continue reading →

She still remembered her very first set of real brushes, and the marvel of being able to draw out of the messy paint some semblance of her own thoughts. “You’ve been trying to paint with house-painting brushes,” Florence had said … Continue reading →

The hall was high and cool and dim, the lights set carefully to age the paintings as little as possible. Between the stone walls, the air filled up with centuries. She thought sometimes of an Egyptian tomb, and not only … Continue reading →

They went to the Metropolitan and then they bought deli food and sat outdoors at Rockefeller Center. Florence browsed the Japanese bookstore and exclaimed over the cover designs and took notes on elegances she might like to use on her … Continue reading →

She had pulled out the stops, every last one of them: no rules, followed her instinct, taken every last bit of technique she’d ever learned and thrown it in rage at the pretty-pretty stuff that everyone wanted. Nuclear test shots … Continue reading →

She painted. Outside, the sun crossed the sky. Under the unchanging light, she painted and fought the difficulties. The impressionist method meant doing it all at once: light and dark, hue and chroma all balanced at once. Not like the … Continue reading →