A Completeness Ravished
by Isota Tucker Epes
(Painting)
Goodwin House - Falls Church, VA
 

 
Virginia Woolf loved London. During the bombings of 1940 and 1941, she mourned for it as for a beloved relative. In this painting, Ms. Epes imagined Woolf standing in the shattered west wing of St. Paul’s Cathedral. When this part of the building went down, legend has it that only the statue of the 17th century Dean, John Donne, was left untouched. In the background is the 18th century house of Dr. Samuel Johnson. A bomb took out the top floor where Johnson and his corps of scholars compiled the famous Dictionary 200 years before. One only has to remember the words of Three Guineas to understand the ramifications of Woolf’s grief.
 
After retiring from a career in teaching and school administration, I decided (to my total surprise) to go to art school with a friend. Fortunately, I was living in Richmond, Virginia, at the time and for 12 years I took all sorts of art courses at Virginia Commonwealth University and at the Virginia Museum of Art from some wonderfully generous and able professors. Then I began to paint full time for group and solo shows. My favorite work is a series of 10 paintings on the brilliant British author, Virginia Woolf., whose writing I discovered at twelve years old and have been reading, both fiction and non-fiction, ever since. In 1991, I discovered the International Virginia Woolf Society, joined and showed my paintings at their 1992 Conference. Over the years I have had eight more exhibitions of the work in various cities. Today I am 87 years old, living in at Goodwin House, an Episcopal retirement community in the Washington, DC area. I still enjoy making art. This Woolf series is not realistic, but as one critic wrote, “more surrealistic than anything else.” In any case, I hope these images convey my growth over the years through the study of Woolf’s superb creations.