200 pages | 9 x 12 | Art/Oil Painting
ISBN: 979-888-855-0045
Hardcover $34.99
Coming Summer 2024
Landscapes
Publication date: August 2024
Shipping date: Fall 2024
This unique memoir is a meditation on the integration of art with life. Alden Mellor Heck ties deeply personal experience to the expressiveness of her own paintings, as well as those of many other artists who have influenced her.
If the history of art is the story of styles
and techniques developing and changing, this book tells a personal art history of an outstanding artist as she pursues how to recreate non-verbal immediate experience of the world.
“She captures the moment just before clarity comes.”
“Why do I paint? What draws me to the moment just before clarity comes, when understanding hides in mists, before the crow takes flight, when dawn light only hints it will reveal itself... that moment, alas, always disappears!
As Wallace Stevens put it:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
Although I have trained in the traditions of European oil painters, I find deep inspiration in the Japanese wabi sabi aesthetic, with its appreciation of minor details of life and insights into the beauty of inconspicuous and overlooked aspects of nature. I am still on the path to perfecting my artlessness.”
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
— Thomas Merton