Dawn Tripp
Auteur van Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe
Over de Auteur
Werken van Dawn Tripp
Tagged
Algemene kennis
- Geslacht
- female
Leden
Besprekingen
I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13155316
This story spans generations, but the protagonist is in the present. Is it Marne, the bitter young woman who has come home for a while? Or her mother Jane? It seems that Jane figures most in the actions, so I'll call it for her.
Marne has returned home from California and doesn't know what her next move will be. She is irritated by her mother, as she has been for years, and is again finding herself attracted to her brother Alex's best friend Ray. Resistant to anything too intimate, Marne nevertheless decides to try him on.
Meanwhile, Jane has been playing chess with Ray's grandmother Ada. Ada may have the key to a mystery Jane has been mulling over since she was a child: what happened to her father. Ada's father Luce had been seeing Ada on the sly when one day he disappeared. As the chess games continue, Jane pumps Ada.
This isn't a straightforward mystery, in which the characters clearly state what they want or what they want to know. They may not know. There are a few odd bits that had me wondering about the timeline. For example, Marne mentions being a teen "thirty years ago" in one place, and then later notes that she is in her thirties. Also, Ray is Ada's son while Marne is Luce's grandson. Possible of course, just a little confusing.
I found it absorbing but wished it hadn't jumped around quite so much, from character to character. I wanted to spend a bit more time with just one.… (meer)
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13155316
This story spans generations, but the protagonist is in the present. Is it Marne, the bitter young woman who has come home for a while? Or her mother Jane? It seems that Jane figures most in the actions, so I'll call it for her.
Marne has returned home from California and doesn't know what her next move will be. She is irritated by her mother, as she has been for years, and is again finding herself attracted to her brother Alex's best friend Ray. Resistant to anything too intimate, Marne nevertheless decides to try him on.
Meanwhile, Jane has been playing chess with Ray's grandmother Ada. Ada may have the key to a mystery Jane has been mulling over since she was a child: what happened to her father. Ada's father Luce had been seeing Ada on the sly when one day he disappeared. As the chess games continue, Jane pumps Ada.
This isn't a straightforward mystery, in which the characters clearly state what they want or what they want to know. They may not know. There are a few odd bits that had me wondering about the timeline. For example, Marne mentions being a teen "thirty years ago" in one place, and then later notes that she is in her thirties. Also, Ray is Ada's son while Marne is Luce's grandson. Possible of course, just a little confusing.
I found it absorbing but wished it hadn't jumped around quite so much, from character to character. I wanted to spend a bit more time with just one.… (meer)
I know I would've enjoyed this better if I hadn't been under the strange misapprehension that this was a whodunit type murder mystery that hinged on a game of scrabble. Yes, there is an unsolved murder which is unraveled through the course of the book, but there is no real investigation, no questioning of suspects, and clues to try to keep track of (unless the reader does this him/herself).
Instead this is a beautifully written, character-driven novel that delves into the sad yet breath-takingly realistic relationships of a few families in a small New England town, using the game of scrabble as in inroad into the minds of the important central characters. If I had realized this from the get-go I would've enjoyed the novel much, much more, but such as it was, I kept waiting for more tension, more plot which never arrived, not realizing until halfway through that this wasn't that kind of book.… (meer)
Instead this is a beautifully written, character-driven novel that delves into the sad yet breath-takingly realistic relationships of a few families in a small New England town, using the game of scrabble as in inroad into the minds of the important central characters. If I had realized this from the get-go I would've enjoyed the novel much, much more, but such as it was, I kept waiting for more tension, more plot which never arrived, not realizing until halfway through that this wasn't that kind of book.… (meer)
NB: The original review included pictures and can be found here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/297302#6607581
“I make forms that echo those early abstract forms I made when I was no one, and it occurs to me that art is a separate country, outside the body, outside time, like death or desire, an element beyond our physical selves we are traveling toward. My hand shakes. Small drops of paint have spilled. So human, so flawed and imprecise, and beautiful for that.”
I don’t know art. I don’t study it. I don’t always (usually?) get it. But I know what I like, and I like Georgia O’Keeffe. When I was a child, my mother received as a gift, a huge coffee table book of fifty O’Keeffe flower paintings, and I loved to page through it. I loved the colors and the shapes and what I now think of as a kind of motion in the paintings. A few years ago, I went to Santa Fe and happily abandoned my not-interested husband to visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum – it was amazing to see her work in person, and I spent a long time in that relatively small space. Earlier this week, I took in some of the galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and came across two O’Keeffes. It inspired me to finally pick up this book, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe by Dawn Tripp, and I immediately sank into it.
Tripp focuses on O’Keeffe’s relationship with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who mentored, seduced, loved, and manipulated her. He photographed her early on in their relationship, and his exhibition of her nude portraits was her introduction to the claustrophobic art world of New York.
When her paintings were finally exhibited, her art was often viewed through the lens provided by Stieglitz’s photos, and O’Keeffe resented it. She resented the gendered terms being used, the reduction of much of her work to sexual expressionism: “I feel heat rising into my face, burning. They are writing me down, this thrall of bow-tied men, straining me into awful, frivolous terms. Every observation they make about my art is linked back to the body of the woman in the photographs.”
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz had a complicated relationship – he wanted to marry, she did not. She wanted a child, he did not. They eventually married and had no children because he convinced her it would interfere with her art. Tripp includes a lot of yearning on O’Keeffe’s part to have a child and the sense of loss when she realizes she won’t. I wondered how much of this was based in the available evidence, to be honest. It seems like such a weirdly conventional and overtly feminine trait to attribute to a woman who rejected so many similar stereotypes for herself.
Tripp writes beautifully, of normal everyday things and of art and artistic inclinations, passions, and frustrations.
“Our mother was cool but not unkind. Her eyes luminous, austere, held a sort of distance we did not belong to, like the line at the end of the sky – that silent point of reference that held everything tethered, the line that seemed to meet the land but never did.”
“The shapes of the world out there are shadowy. Lean and contoured strokes, they glow. The moon shines and cuts the night open.”
Her portrait of a stormy relationship is sensitive and nicely-detailed; she includes small moments to illustrate the push and pull between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz and in so doing makes them very real and sympathetic to the reader. One is simultaneously frustrated and moved by them. In the end, O’Keeffe reclaims herself and her art, and the last sections of the book, where she is an old woman, are beautifully done.
“I will go back to New Mexico. I will walk out into the dry nothingness of the country that I love and paint: sharp-edged flowers, desert abstractions, cow skulls – images of Thanatos. I will title my work and that is what they will see: the subject that fills space and the words that define it. They will not notice that what I am really after – all I was ever really after – is that raw desire of the sky pouring through the windowed socket of a bone.”
Despite plenty of flaws, I really loved this book.
4.5 stars
“When I make a picture of a flower, I don’t paint it as I see it, but as its essence moves me. I eliminate every detail that’s extraneous. I paint it as I want it to be felt.”
“Day after day, it is the desolation of this country that enthralls me. How the wind sweeps the light and throws it into vibrant shifting patterns of color and shadow against the cliffs. I breathe. My mind loosens like a fist and empties. I do not think of him. I drive, I walk, I paint, and I am not the woman that he made.”
And this was fun – this is one of the paintings I saw at the Met on Monday.
“This will be my answer to the men who are always setting out to make the Great American Novel or the Great American Photograph. This will be my joke on them. Lines of red, white, and blue, and that mythic, imperfect cow skull – that piece of country – floating there through the center, the stripped cold strength of that bone that lasts and lasts, rising out of the blue like some crazy American dream. It will be unsalable – who would hang a thing like this? I don’t care. They may not like it, but they’ll notice. Whether they get it or not. They don’t make the country like I do. They don’t see that what is most magical and lush exists where you would never think to look. The bones are not what you imagine. I told Beck this once. Not death. But the life that is left over. When I finish the painting, I study it. It isn’t pretty, but it’s what I want it to be.”… (meer)
“I make forms that echo those early abstract forms I made when I was no one, and it occurs to me that art is a separate country, outside the body, outside time, like death or desire, an element beyond our physical selves we are traveling toward. My hand shakes. Small drops of paint have spilled. So human, so flawed and imprecise, and beautiful for that.”
I don’t know art. I don’t study it. I don’t always (usually?) get it. But I know what I like, and I like Georgia O’Keeffe. When I was a child, my mother received as a gift, a huge coffee table book of fifty O’Keeffe flower paintings, and I loved to page through it. I loved the colors and the shapes and what I now think of as a kind of motion in the paintings. A few years ago, I went to Santa Fe and happily abandoned my not-interested husband to visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum – it was amazing to see her work in person, and I spent a long time in that relatively small space. Earlier this week, I took in some of the galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and came across two O’Keeffes. It inspired me to finally pick up this book, Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe by Dawn Tripp, and I immediately sank into it.
Tripp focuses on O’Keeffe’s relationship with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who mentored, seduced, loved, and manipulated her. He photographed her early on in their relationship, and his exhibition of her nude portraits was her introduction to the claustrophobic art world of New York.
When her paintings were finally exhibited, her art was often viewed through the lens provided by Stieglitz’s photos, and O’Keeffe resented it. She resented the gendered terms being used, the reduction of much of her work to sexual expressionism: “I feel heat rising into my face, burning. They are writing me down, this thrall of bow-tied men, straining me into awful, frivolous terms. Every observation they make about my art is linked back to the body of the woman in the photographs.”
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz had a complicated relationship – he wanted to marry, she did not. She wanted a child, he did not. They eventually married and had no children because he convinced her it would interfere with her art. Tripp includes a lot of yearning on O’Keeffe’s part to have a child and the sense of loss when she realizes she won’t. I wondered how much of this was based in the available evidence, to be honest. It seems like such a weirdly conventional and overtly feminine trait to attribute to a woman who rejected so many similar stereotypes for herself.
Tripp writes beautifully, of normal everyday things and of art and artistic inclinations, passions, and frustrations.
“Our mother was cool but not unkind. Her eyes luminous, austere, held a sort of distance we did not belong to, like the line at the end of the sky – that silent point of reference that held everything tethered, the line that seemed to meet the land but never did.”
“The shapes of the world out there are shadowy. Lean and contoured strokes, they glow. The moon shines and cuts the night open.”
Her portrait of a stormy relationship is sensitive and nicely-detailed; she includes small moments to illustrate the push and pull between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz and in so doing makes them very real and sympathetic to the reader. One is simultaneously frustrated and moved by them. In the end, O’Keeffe reclaims herself and her art, and the last sections of the book, where she is an old woman, are beautifully done.
“I will go back to New Mexico. I will walk out into the dry nothingness of the country that I love and paint: sharp-edged flowers, desert abstractions, cow skulls – images of Thanatos. I will title my work and that is what they will see: the subject that fills space and the words that define it. They will not notice that what I am really after – all I was ever really after – is that raw desire of the sky pouring through the windowed socket of a bone.”
Despite plenty of flaws, I really loved this book.
4.5 stars
“When I make a picture of a flower, I don’t paint it as I see it, but as its essence moves me. I eliminate every detail that’s extraneous. I paint it as I want it to be felt.”
“Day after day, it is the desolation of this country that enthralls me. How the wind sweeps the light and throws it into vibrant shifting patterns of color and shadow against the cliffs. I breathe. My mind loosens like a fist and empties. I do not think of him. I drive, I walk, I paint, and I am not the woman that he made.”
And this was fun – this is one of the paintings I saw at the Met on Monday.
“This will be my answer to the men who are always setting out to make the Great American Novel or the Great American Photograph. This will be my joke on them. Lines of red, white, and blue, and that mythic, imperfect cow skull – that piece of country – floating there through the center, the stripped cold strength of that bone that lasts and lasts, rising out of the blue like some crazy American dream. It will be unsalable – who would hang a thing like this? I don’t care. They may not like it, but they’ll notice. Whether they get it or not. They don’t make the country like I do. They don’t see that what is most magical and lush exists where you would never think to look. The bones are not what you imagine. I told Beck this once. Not death. But the life that is left over. When I finish the painting, I study it. It isn’t pretty, but it’s what I want it to be.”… (meer)
4 
katiekrug | 32 andere besprekingen | Oct 19, 2018 |
katiekrug | 32 andere besprekingen | Oct 19, 2018 | Lijsten
Prijzen
Misschien vindt je deze ook leuk
Statistieken
- Werken
- 5
- Leden
- 502
- Populariteit
- #49,320
- Waardering
- 3.7
- Besprekingen
- 41
- ISBNs
- 26
- Talen
- 2
- Favoriet
- 2
stieglitz well. Georgia was a woman in need of control and she was portrayed as more 3-dimensional than Stieglitz. Of course it was upsetting to learn of the abuse she experienced. Many of the details did not add to the story.