Night Street

by Kristel Thornell

An intensely satisfying novel that celebrates the short richly lived life of Australian artist, Clarice Beckett. Co-winner of the 2009 Australian/Vogel Literary Award.

Night Street is the passionate story of a young painter, Clarice Beckett, who defies society's strict conventions and indifferent art critics alike and leads an intense private and professional life. With her extraordinary talent for making simple city and seascapes haunting and mysteriously revelatory, Clarice paints prolifically and lives largely, overcoming the seemingly confined existence as the spinster daughter in the parental home.
Night Street began with Thornell's first encounter with the paintings of Melbourne artist Clarice Beckett (1887-1935) at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The subtle power of Clarice's highly atmospheric, enigmatic landscapes enabled her to imagine Clarice's inner life and shape an extraordinary novel.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Art, Australia, Read For School, Fiction

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Kristel Thornell was born in Sydney, Australia, and has also lived in Italy, Mexico, Canada, Finland and the US. Her debut novel, Night Street, co-won the 2009 Australian / Vogel Literary Award and won the Dobbie Literary Award for a first book and the Barbara Ramsden Award for best book of the year. Night Street was also a finalist for the Glenda Adams Award and the Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the NSW Premier’s Awards,and Kristell was named one of the Best Young Australian Novelists by The Sydney Morning Herald in 2011. Her short fiction, poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in a range of journals. She has completed degrees at the University of Sydney and the University of New Brunswick, and a PhD with the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. She is based in upstate New York.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novel is a fictionalised life of the painter Clarice Beckett, who lived and worked in Beaumaris under the most extraordinarily difficult conditions. Having studied under Frederick McCubbin and Max Meldrum, she then found herself having to care for frail parents during daylight hours, and was only able to paint between dusk and dawn. She managed to pursue her art despite these difficulties but never found favour with the local art scene. Beckett died young, her work unrecognised and left to rot
in an outdoor shed. It was not until a retrospective of Australian Tonalists in the Art Gallery of South Australia, that her significance was finally recognised. (To see some of her paintings, click here).

From these brief facts about Beckett’s life, debut author Kristel Thornell has crafted a novel of surprising vitality.
To see the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...

[G.G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful rendition of the life of the Australian artist Clarice Beckett (1887-1935). Kristel Thornell states that "the Clarice who appears in this work is not Clarice Beckett" (p. 241); for the known facts of the artist's life, see: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/becke....

Instead of the "poor Clarice" figure with whom we are familiar, dutifully caring for ungrateful parents, her paintings thrown away in the chooks' yard after her death, Thornell has imagined an artist with a passionate nature, a rich inner life, and an uncompromising commitment to painting. And why not?

The novel is full of acutely observed characterizations: who isn't familiar with the "Mum...[who] was attracted to Culture, associating it with elegant grandeur and civilised pleasantness"? (p. 14) The natural world that Clarice spent her life painting is also memorably described: "The sea gave itself entirely. It did not hold back, having no modesty or reason for restraint. It surrendered because it never lost anything." (p. 48) "The low sky thickened, like white sauce reducing in a pan." (p. 57)

But what I found most impressive, and convincing, about Night Street is Thornell's ability to describe the work of looking that an artist does. Here is Clarice, out, as usual, at sunrise on the beach at Beaumaris with her portable easel:

There was a problem, early on, a blockage. She had rushed. Rushing, she distracted herself by thinking about composition. She caught herself doing it, wasting mental energy, shackled to the named world. She was not seeing but naming--bathing box, water, sky--and in this way holding on to things, stuck in their net. [...] She closed her eyes, trying to relinquish it. Then gazed anew, cleanly at the view she was portraying and yes, found herself in the space of pure ocular sensation. [...] In the end, when she laid her brush down and finally invited words and the things they named back like reprimanded children from the other room, Clarice thought she had the proof of her diligence. She had transcribed the visible, some of it at least; there was some truth here. (pp. 100-101)

I felt that there was more than merely some truth in Thornell's imagining of Clarice Beckett's life.

[Steve lovell · Rating 4 out of 5]

As frequenter of the art galleries of big cities, I am conversely rarely drawn to local art exhibitions. Many moons ago one did entice, a collection of works by a then relatively unknowm Clarice Beckett. Her misty renderings of the streets and coastlines of Melbourne and its environs immediately entranced - she came across as a latter day antipodean Turner with her muted sombre sublety. This book in many ways reflects the art work of its subject, although we are reminded this is not a biography but an imagining. Details of Beckett's life are 'sketchy'on the Net, but the bare bones are beautifully given meat by Thornell. This is a prize-winning first novel by an author who writes in a Brookneresque manner - that is she produces rich detail about a largely small life.In her work, and maybe in real life too, the artist's life centred on painting expeditions and caring for elderly parents. Out of kilter came a highly charged sexual encounter in her married lover's surgery, an incongruously out of character event, and that seemed to be the only 'climax' in the novel. In her relationships though with this gentleman and a previous tryst with a similarly taken partner, Beckett did show, in Thornell's imagination, that she could be quietly bohemian, as fits Melbourne at the time. But she broke from her confines to sizzle very rarely, and largly led an existence of salutory frustration. Hopefully the real Carice was able to 'sizzle' a little more and maybe there is an author out there who will do an unimagined work on her real life one day! As for Thornell, on this evidence I will be eagerly awaiting her next offering with a degree of expectation.

[Siegrist · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this quietly absorbing novel in one sitting. I've always loved Clarice Beckett's tiny canvases and it was intriguinging to be taken so completely into her head. Just lovely!

[Vicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kristel Thornell's imagined life of Australian landscape painter Clarice Beckett is a sensory cornucopia as well as a testament to unwavering artistic commitment. Clarice's dreams were fevered and vivid, and without having seen any of Beckett's work but only pictured it through Thornell's evocative prose, I suspect Clarice's images and dreams will haunt my own.

[Lija · Rating 2 out of 5]

I knew when I reached the point where the sky was likened to "white sauce reducing in a pan" that this book was not for me. Unfortunately, it's a book we'll be studying in school this year so I was forced to finish it.

[Margaret Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fictionalised work of the life of the artist Clarice Beckett, as ethereal as her paintings. Kristel Thornell beautifully describes Melbourne as Clarice sees it, set amongst the social mores of the day and which Clarice quietly but stubbornly resists in both in her paintings and her relationships.

[Suze · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel about Australian artist Clarice Beckett, my first goodreads free book, was like a sustained prose-poem. Thornell’s language is beautifully sophisticated as it paints images like art, finding a tonal quality as did Beckett in her vaporous paintings. “The fine movements of her brush sewed her own fibres firmly to life.” (p.101) The plot is merely the timeline of the artist’s life, but I was content to submerge in it like a meditation, misty and fuzzy-edged. “… she realized that a painted view suggested something beyond itself: the substratum of an emotion, the air that a story might pass through.” (p.51) For lovers of art and poetry. It’s amazingly fine work for a first novel by a young author worth watching.

[Carmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Night Street is a dreamy book, filled with passion for art. The life of Clarice Beckett is imagined, although she was a real artist living at the beginning of the twentieth century who painted some wonderfully modern pieces in Australia. She was virtually unknown during her life due to her gender and the different nature of her work, but when her pieces were rediscovered she became part of Australia's artistic history. Kristel Thornell has depicted her life as introverted, secluded and consumed by her painting. Indeed, the author evoked the artist in the book - the writing was dreamlike, tonal, illuminating, and lyrical. It is hard to believe that this is her first novel.

* I received this book for free from Goodreads First Reads.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most insightful books about the creative mind that I have ever read and her choice of one of my favourite artists, Clarice Beckett, as the protagonist made this totally fascinating. Despite the author's declaration that this was not meant to be a 'biography', nevertheless I found her descriptions of paintings and of places around Melbourne so authentic that it was a real joy to read. The intense depiction of the artist's inner life grounds the book in fiction but it also encourages me to explore more factual works about this wonderful artist.
Thornell was a joint winner of the Australian/Vogel Literary Award for unpublished manuscript and it is easy to see why.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a major achievement inspired by an artist I have long admired. The real Clarice Beckett has always fascinated me - her dedication to her art, her belief in her own abilities and not being swayed by people who called her paintings murky. She just kept on painting and remained true to herself - a very individual "Misty Modern".
I thought Thornell did a wonderful job of bringing the artist to life but it seemed that once she had done that, something was lost - as if the author had painted herself into a corner. I was, of course, expecting the end but I still felt it "fell off". The book though is still a haunting evocation of a unique artist.

[Greg Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book. It was somewhat hypnotic - inviting the reader into what we might imagine was the transcendental state of the artist at work. Clarice Beckett was interested in theosophy and transcendentalism and it is not a far stretch to imagine her using altered states in her creative process. This is certainly how I feel when I look at her paintings. The book is also funny and observant and very moving. I wished it was longer, but that's the power of minimalism - to leave a sense of yearning.

[Rob Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A writer’s interpretation of the life of the painter Clarice Beckett that seems to fit her life so well, that you wish it was true. Subtle and soft writing that lends its self quite comparatively against the artworks of Clarice Beckett.

The ending is just so effective; it is a picture (just like Beckett’s) in words that melt into your mind.

You can find an article on Clarice Beckett here
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jul...

[Colleen Maclennan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won this book on Goodreads and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was not familiar with the artist Clarice Beckett but this book gave me an insight into her life. The author was able to capture her artistic ability as well as her human struggles with relationships . The characters were all very unique . The author was able to show something simple through my eyes was very detailed and beautiful in the eyes of Clarice.

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favourite books about the artist Clarice Beckett, the author used historical research with her own creative take on Clarice's rather sad life, her work was forgetten, then found in a shed in the country, badly damaged and the gallery owner Rosalind, have forgetten her surname re-established her in the 1980's.

[Angief · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won a free copy of this book from Goodreads. I am not sure I would have purchased this book myself had I not received this copy. I personally do not know a lot about art or Clarice Beckett;however, I really enjoyed this book and it made me interested in learning more.

[Joanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Found this book boring

[James McArdle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is fantasy an unwelcome intrusion on truth in life writing and portrayal?

I have just finished reading Kristel Thornell’s Night Street. Yesterday I went to hear Kate Forsyth speak at the Bendigo Writer’s Festival, where she was asked about the way she treats real figures from the past in her historical romances. She expressed her annoyance with those writers who do not adhere to the facts when taking a real person for a character in their stories, and who twist their life story to fit their narrative, and introduce anachronisms or other anomalies that betray insufficient research into the life.

For her own latest book The Blue Rose Forsyth has been able to trace the name of a real gardener who accompanied the British expedition to China that was the venture that may have returned with the red rose of the story. Nothing else is known of the man, so Forsyth feels at liberty to invent a character using his name, but for books like Beauty in Thorns, which is full of the real women and men of the pre-Raphaelite circle, she cannot permit herself such licence and instead her narrative is a strategic re-drawing, more accurately a re-tracing, of the complex threads of their fateful relationships to make a story that is as a consequence richer and more intricate that even she might weave from imagination alone. Nevertheless, biography and letters leave a mere skeleton, so what is integral to the writing is a feat of imagination to fill out the historical husk with her protagonists’ thoughts, to synthesise the speech issuing from them into an enactment of those relationships, and to devise an architecture of naturalistic construction that envelops a theme.

Thornell’s debut novel Night Street, first published in 2010, was co-winner of the 2009 Australian / Vogel Literary Award and won the 2011 Dobbie Literary Award and the 2010 Barbara Ramsden Award. It also won the 2012 Andrew Eiseman Writers Award for the best book written in Western New York. It was shortlisted for the Glenda Adams Award and the Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the 2011 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and has been included since 2014 in the Victorian Curriculum Authority’s Text Lists and has been published in North America by Goose Lane Editions.

Despite this acclaim, would Forsyth regard it as having broken her taboo on the treatment of real people in fiction? Put to this test, it does. What Thornell gives us is an extensive account of two fictitious affairs amidst her otherwise fairly faithful account of Beckett’s career.

To be fair, at the end of the book she issues a disclaimer…

The Clarice who appears in this work is not Clarice Beckett (1887-1935), but my imagining of her…I attempted to ‘look’ at Beckett as she might have looked at a landscape, squinting to soften edges and reach beyond detail in the search for patterns of light and shade.

The designer of the Goose Lane (Canada) edition that I read has attempted a similar reworking. On the cover is the Beckett painting Wet Evening of 1927 for which Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum is credited; it happens to be from a photographic copy I made for the Gallery.

I say ‘reworking’ because while the cover is a vertically-cropped detail from a landscape-format painting, in the upper left a further edit has been applied; a grey intrusion that is an extension of the foliage in the original and a mechanical-looking stroke that hovers against the simple silhouette of a roof gable at the centre of the cover. Despite being known as a ‘tonalist’, a grey unmodulated by some colour was not used by Beckett, and here these blobs and squiggles, despite being rendered in soft focus, are an ugly intrusion on the vision of anyone at all familiar with the painter’s work. And they are unnecessary since there is already some framing foliage, a soft dark mass of deep phthalocyanine green of the dense ti-tree in near darkness of evening along Beach Road.

I should declare my own intimate familiarity with the landscape of Beaumaris that Beckett painted. I grew up there, but some twenty and thirty years after she had passed so early, at 48, the same age as were my brother and father when they died. I know the bitter tannin of the leaves of the Leptospermum laevigatum, the Coastal Ti-tree. I recall with a smile the coiling lumpy seedpods of the Acacia Longifolia Sophorae and their pungent farty odour when crushed that delighted us as school children, quite in contrast to the faint cinnamon perfume of their caterpillar-like yellow blossoms. I lay on hot windy days in the shade of the twisting rough grey trunks of Banksia integrifolia, entranced as the wind turned its long serrated leaves, dark green on top, white beneath. A generous tree, it rewarded a caress of its cylindrical flowers by leaving our hands honeyed with a delicious nectar which we could lick greedily.

Around the beach the soft yellowish or orange sandstone was exposed by the action of the waves, and still you could find aboriginal wells cut into it. But away from the sea and under the dense scrub, the fine sand, covered in the tracks of skinks, snakes and weevil beetles, turns grey, and quite black beneath, from rotting vegetation. In my teenage years all that boggy sand of the bush tracks was tarred over, the empty blocks were all covered by ever more expensive houses, and the heath and scrub all disappeared. I have returned rarely, only to be saddened by the vestigial reminders of an edenic childhood. What I was seeking in buying Thornell’s novel was some sweet evocation of Beaumaris as I knew it, but also an insight into Beckett’s process of painting.

This does have to do with photography, and Night Street.

Beckett’s was an extension of the scientific method promoted by Max Meldrum, her mentor. His Tonalism required that symbolism and narrative be subjugated to an intense, objective observation that was to be transposed exactly onto the canvas in abbreviated tones. For me her paintings, and the way they conjure my Beaumaris memories, are proof of the success of this approach. Thornell devotes much of her writing to describing what for me is so like the process of photography, involving the same substitution and abbreviation of observed tonality that is formulated in Ansel Adams’ ‘previsualisation’ and his Zone System.

What Beckett brought to this was colour, and that is rendered, not so much in ’soft focus’ or through a ‘mist’ as has been described by her critical contemporaries, but more precisely like something else I remember. One day with my father I visited an antique shop above Red Bluff, nearer Melbourne from Black Rock and Beaumaris. In the shop was a wooden view camera—the first I’d ever seen—on a stand. Its open brass lens faced the window and a view across the Bay was projected onto its ground glass which glowed in the darkness of the shop.

Disorientingly turned upside down, the scene was formed of a flat patchwork of abstract luminous colours; flecks of surf traversed blue grainy glass and tiny trees hung their trembling branches into it. I badly wanted that camera and years later, had more than one.

Beckett’s paintings, if they were photographs, might be of little interest. Her subject matter is banal and stubbornly prosaic and contrasts with that of the other tonalists, especially Meldrum’s, in eschewing anything ‘picturesque’ and by incorporating the then modern incidentals of power poles and motor cars. As photographs they would be as random snapshots, which she exceeds by painstakingly and so accurately recording atmosphere; weather conditions and qualities of light.

In photography I can think of none more bold and dedicated in that regard than Bill Henson in his The light fades but the gods remain which runs until 29 September at Monash Gallery of Art. Like Beckett, Henson’s images are tightly cropped with steep perspective that renders of suburban fences, the rampant kikuyu of vacant blocks, tiled rooves and skies, a geometry of achingly beautiful colour.

Thornell might feasibly, were she more of an art historian, have devoted her entire narrative to the progress of Beckett’s stylistic development without resort to fanciful romance. The real drama was Beckett’s contention with the critics; the most unfavourable and condescending being from the fascist-misogynist Melbourne Herald reviewer James S. MacDonald, but with respect and admiration from one, Percy Leason, in Table Talk. To be fair, though she does not give credit to what a breakthrough was Beckett’s embracing the dimension of colour with the same discipline as she applied to tone, Thornell does make a good fist of evoking the struggle, especially in this passage;

"Sunrise seemed to come reluctantly and she felt it form and take hold of her as she fumbled with her kit in the damp, muddled time just before dawn—the darkness that was occasionally in her tingeing everything with its dark hue. The wind off the water was sharp. She fixed her focusing point, pulled her hat down lower and separated her feet further, bracing.
"But then the hours of reprieve, absence, dwelling nowhere and occupying each particle of what she saw. Work. The other place.
"There was a problem, early on, a blockage. She had rushed. Rushing, she distracted herself by thinking about composition. She caught herself doing it, wasting mental energy, shackled to the named world. She was not seeing but naming—bathing box, water, sky——and in this way holding on to things, stuck in their net.
"She was on her own, studying under no teacher and sometimes, if this felt odd, she was able to summon Meldrum. That morning, she heard him bidding her to simplify, simplify, to forget her awareness of things.
"She closed her eyes, trying to relinquish it.
"Then gazed anew, cleanly at the view she was painting and yes, found herself in the space of pure ocular sensation. She raised her palette and brush. Only the visual miracle of nature existed. Where last night she had climbed out of Arthur’s van, releasing that particular dream, now she gripped the hand of reality. She would not let go. She painted, speaking only the universal language of depiction, a scientist of the visible world—or perhaps, though this could never be said to Meldrum, some class of medium or mystic. The fine movements of her brush sewed her own fibres firmly to life.
"In the end, when she laid her brush down and finally invited words and the things they named back like reprimanded children from the other room, Clarice thought she had the proof of her diligence. She had transcribed the visible, some of it at least; there was some truth here. She showed the seascape to its reflection in the mirror she had made. There.
"The bathing box at the shoreline and everything suspended, nestled within a smoky haze. The brownish-olive cliff. A suggestion of the curve of the next bay. The water, nearly flat: pink, grey, white, blue. One sensed that the ocean was not senseless but a sentient, musing thing. The bathing box’s torn door was iron red. Across the expanse of water, beyond early morning’s cloudy drift, a softness of coastline.
"She hankered for salt on her skin, but it was not a day for swimming; it was cold and chaotic and her body too unrcstcd. She packed up and took the path between shaggy, dispassionate gums, wattle and tea-trees. Concentration and clarity left her, now it was over, and she was gone to the dogs. The cart was even more unwieldy than before.
"She was panting when, at home, she sneaked a last anxious look at her canvas, which would take days to dry and become definitive, closed the shed door on it and resumed her second life as housemaid.

Here, we are back at the problem of the biography. Thornell, ultimately, disappoints. One feels cheated by her Clarice, who is a selfish person…sadly not unlike so many artists (think Picasso). Hers is not a the generous art that the real Miss Beckett has left me, a lover of Beaumaris.

In photography, the equivalent of written biography is the portrait. There too, some practitioners intrude fiction, a fantasised version of the subject; a being nothing like them at all. An instance is the work of Delphine Diallo and Namsa Leuba in the in their upcoming show Notre Dame / Our Lady from October 3 at Boogie-Wall, 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London.

Namsa Leuba exhibited February-May this year at Cairns Art Gallery here in Australia and her most recent project, Illusions, was created in Tahiti, inspired by the paintings of Paul Gauguin, with a nod to the lush kitsch ‘tropicana’ of Vladimir Tretchikoff. Leuba’s subjects in her fictional narratives are actually Tahitian “Mahu” (an effeminate man) or “rae rae” (transgender) but metamorphose into the ultra-feminine stereotype of the “vahine”. They become symbolic beyond the confines of any particular body or any individual biography.

Night Street, as good as it indeed is, presents a conundrum in biographical writing. One wonders if Thornell had left her subject unnamed and relied on the chance that she might be recognised as based on the life of Clarice Beckett, that we might not be left with a more robust work.

[Laurel Kinross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slow moving, and detailed this book allows us to participate in Agatha's disappearance. It is thoughtful and feels as though this was a possible explanation about the days where she vanished. It just lacked a little in energy but that is how she may have been herself.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating novel based on the life of a Melbourne landscape artist. It’s very much a commentary on historical role of women, with the protagonist forging an unusual path, as much as she’s able. Written in a richly descriptive fashion, as is fitting for the subject matter, I’m glad I chased down a copy. It’s a shame it’s not more readily available.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written account of a wonderful Australian artists life. Kristel Thornton captures in her prose the uniqueness of Clarice Beckett.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime. How this went out of print in Australia is a mystery.

[Susan Steggall]

A highly original book based on a somewhat risky idea – that of creating a fictional work from a real-life story. As Thornell says in her Author’s Note, ‘The Clarice who appears in this work is not Clarice Beckett (1887-1935) but my imagining of her. While the historical figure’s art and life inspired me, I took many creative liberties with these’.
In writing fiction (much as John Banville did in ‘The Untouchable’, a fictional life of art historian Anthony Blunt), Thornell is able to get inside the heart and mind of her artist protagonist in a way biography cannot do. The author has created an extraordinary inner world of an artist passionate to the point of obsession, about her art, her way of seeing the landscape (be it Melbourne’s city streets, country paddocks or sweeping sandy beaches) and her determination to paint it her way regardless of public opinion. The writing is rich and original without being overly so and at times almost claustrophobic when ‘Clarice’ is trying to come to terms with who she is and how she fits – or doesn’t fit – into the social fabric of her time.
As someone who considers Clarice Beckett one of Australia’s foremost artists I very much enjoyed the book.

[T. Stranger · Rating 3 out of 5]

VCE TEXT LIST 2015 -

Call a spade a spade except when it's a tool for digging, having an iron blade adapted for pressing into the ground with the foot and a long handle commonly with a grip or crosspiece at the top, and with the blade usually narrower and flatter than that of a shovel.


"Night Street" by Kristel Thornell is a novel chosen as part of the Context: Imaginative Landscape section of the English study design. Its purpose is to provide students with a muse to which they can cultivate and nurture different ideas relating to all things imaginative. The story is indeed evocative, well-written, lyrical, and adheres to a sense of art within its pages. However, the book is challenging - especially the vocabulary - and I would find it difficult to teach to a regular English classroom. However, I am by no means an expert. For some students, this book may well be the answer to some very difficult questions.

[Elaine Haby · Rating 1 out of 5]

Found this quite disappointing. I would have preferred to read a more accurate version of her life story. This story did not sit comfortably with my view of the paintings of Clarice Beckett, her time and era. But maybe it's just that my romanticised view of her and her time are different. I enjoyed the painterly writing to begin with, but towards the end of the book tired of that approach. It became an effort to finish.

[girlpower12121 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was another set novel for my final year of high school and thank goodness that this novel was enjoyable. I absolutely loved Thornell's poetic descriptions and did enjoy the narrative quite a bit. This novel is one of the better novels that I have read for English over the last 6 years. At times I found it hard to stay focused at the time which meant that I couldn't read this in one sitting but it was still enjoyable and made for a good read.

4/5 for me
C.A.Anna

[Lyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not familiar with the artist depicted in this book. However, I enjoyed reading it. I particularly loved the beach descriptions, and got to know her well by the end of the story. The author does state that this is a fictional portrayal of Clarice Beckett but not knowing the story of the "real" Clarice I found this a good read.

[Sunday · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful novel about Clarice Beckett a young woman who resisted the normal conventions of where her life was supposed to go in order to paint.
Careful - this novel will make you want to take the day off in favour of heading down to Beaumaris beach with your easel!

[Kali Napier · Rating 5 out of 5]

An imagined life of Melbourne artist Clarice Beckett. The prose creates a misty, soft focus on the artist’s life, reflecting the moody landscapes she painted. It’s a quiet life with moments of frisson, well-lived, but ultimately as expendable as her artwork. Sad, moving, and engaging.

[Maria Papazoglou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really made me think about how liberated women are and for that matter men.