Literary / Historical Fiction
Date Published: 09-25-2202
Publisher: Woodpecker Lane Press
In this vividly-rendered novel, Melanie Dugan reimagines the life of Alice
Neel, a groundbreaking American painter who revolutionized the art of the
portrait in the twentieth century. Born in 1900 into a straitlaced
middle-class family, Neel charted her own unconventional path. Her lifetime
spanned World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic, women winning the right to vote,
the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy Era, the Civil Rights Era,
and second-wave feminism. She worked for decades in obscurity, wrestling
with depression, poverty, and misogyny, loving the wrong men, fighting to
live life on her own terms, and above all to paint.
EXCERPT
Hard White
- Self Portrait (1980)
I start with wood and canvas, the wood assembled into a stretcher, the canvas stretched over the wood frame then primed with a ground of white gesso (chalk, glue): hard white, I call it. Hard white because it doesn’t allow for errors or a change of mind. If you go back and re-draw something, the ghost of your earlier idea is there for everyone to see. You can try to erase what you drew, but the ghost image will still be there, so why bother? You have to just work over it. But I like that. It keeps you honest. And it’s like life — our errors and changes of mind, our detours, our wrong turns are what make us who and what we are.
Some painters like the canvas stretched loose; I like it tighter, with a little more play, a springiness under my brush.
I begin with drawing. Drawing is the essence of painting. Drawing is seeing; seeing is the beginning of knowing the world.
Those people who look at Jackson’s work and say, “My two-year-old could do better than that” know nothing. They don’t know how to see. They don’t understand the structure he’s created, the layers he’s applied — the same way life applies layers to us all, gradually shaping us into the people we become — so that each of his paintings builds to a symphony, that’s what makes them sing.
In the same way, each of my paintings is layer on layer of knowing, knowing learned through hard experience, knowing myself, knowing the individual I’m painting. Insight is another word for knowing. Earned is another word for learned.
About the Author
Melanie Dugan is the author of Bee Summers (“a carefully wrought
portrayal of the way we carry trauma with us through life.” Brenda
Schmidt, Quill & Quire), Dead Beautiful (“the writing is
gorgeous,” A Soul Unsung), Revising Romance (“heartwarming,
amusing and…downright sexy,” Midwest Book Review), and Sometime
Daughter (“Stunning debut,” Kingston Whig-Standard). Her short
stories have been shortlisted for several awards, including the CBC Literary
award. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
Contact Links
Purchase
Novel Idea bookstore, Kingston, Ontario
