Source: Nature's Healing Role in Art and Writing

by Janine Burke

Creativity is a place. Memory is an image. The artistic process itself is a journey, a specific one, the return to a lost and cherished childhood realm, the original source of inspiration and identity.
For the artists and writers in this book - Claude Monet, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Karen Blixen, Ernest Hemingway, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso and Emily Kame Kngwarreye - the act of re-creating Eden was a life-changing, art-making, healing rite that becomes both a map of their careers and an index of their subject matter.
What unites these artists and writers is a journey of return, of rediscovery, that leads them to the creation of a personal paradise. Upon arriving at that place, whether it was Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico, Monet in Giverny or Picasso in Provence, iconic new work emerged, inspired by that terrain, from its light, its colours, its landscape. Each of these artists had recovered the place they'd been unconsciously seeking for years.
In this engaging and ground-breaking book, acclaimed biographer and art historian Janine Burke explores how art and landscape, love and companionship, home and garden are entwined. Nature is culture, and its most insistent inspiration.

Genres: Art

480 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2009

About the author

Dr. Janine Burke is an art historian and biographer, and has written eight books of fiction and art history. She has degrees from the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University. She was a lecturer in art history until she resigned from her job to become a full-time writer, which she has been for the last ten years.

Her books include Australian Women Artists, 1840-1940, Second Sight, which won the 1987 Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction, and Company of Images, which was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year award and the Miles Franklin Award. Her novel for teenagers, Journey to Bright Water, is published by Mammoth. She also contributed to Libby Hawthorn's anthology of short stories, The Blue Dress.

Janine has curated exhibitions of historical and contemporary art, and currently holds a research fellowship at Monash University. She lives in Melbourne, where she regularly reviews, lectures and broadcasts on radio.

Reviews

[Jennifer Rolfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Place is often referred to in biography and memoir but Burke's exploration of place on various writers and artists work and psychological well-being was really fascinating.