Wednesday, March 25, 2009

WAR AND PEACE - Expanded story April 11, 2009























Image size:  approx. 24" x 22"   (1982)
Media:  Recycled rag paper, discarded  b/w print pieces
with a miniature print of dove form in the center.

One of  five in the Sculpture Garden Series - the title was appropriated at the time for this image as a succinct allusion to Leo Tolstoi's wordy but, none-the-less, great novel.   I saw this image as a likeness in its parts.

As Virginia Woolf illustrates in her essay, Women and Fiction (1929),  why women writers living in the 19th century did not write such novels    "... remarkable novelists as they were, they were profoundly influenced by the fact that they were excluded by their sex from certain kinds of experience.   "That experience has a great influence upon fiction is indisputable.....Take away all that Tolstoi knew of war as a soldier, of life and society as a rich young man whose education admitted him to all sort of experience, and 'War and Peace' would be incredibly impoverished."       

See page 28 to read the entire essay in The Essays of Virginia Woolf {with notes} Vol. 5, edited by Stuart Clarke, Hogarth Press, 2009 - a great read and resource.
 



3 comments:

  1. Even when I enlarged the piece I couldn't make-out the picture in the centre and I'm sure that's the key to the whole thing. Could you enlighten me?

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  2. Apart from its tactile nature and contrasting colour suggesting the title to the artist, in the center is an abstract symbol of the dove.

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  3. Rinkly: I have expanded on my story about the print WAR AND PEACE for your enlightenment!

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