Giving Birth to a Novel
by Isota Tucker Epes
(Painting)
Goodwin House - Falls Church, VA
 

 
While painting this picture, the figure of the old woman in the lower left appeared out of nowhere. She seems to be the nameless, homeless creature in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway who stood by the tube station chanting in meaningless syllables of old loves and ancient spring times. The life force itself, Woolf suggests, ageless, enduring. And here, perhaps, the midwife?
 
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.