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For
She Is the Breadth of the Power of God
Jan
Neal, Curator presented
June 15, 2006 |
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Two
Ways of Seeing
by Isota Tucker Epes
(Painting)
Goodwin House
- Falls Church, VA
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Virginia Woolf was intimately involved with the visual
arts as well as the literary world of London from 1910
to 1940. Her sister, Vanessa Bell, was an important
painter of the period whose work now hangs in the Tate
Gallery. Woolf herself was asked to write the biography
of Roger Fry, the art historian, curator an painter
who introduced modern art and cubism to England in a
controversial exhibit.
In this painting Isota Epes, strips the scene bare –
just the writer and the white page, the painter and
the empty canvas, two ways of seeing.
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.
Overt 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.
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