When I first saw the starting book for the August Six Degrees of Separation at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest’s page, I thought “At last! A starting book that I have actually read!” The idea of this meme is that Kate suggests a starting book, then you let your ideas bounce to six other books related (however tangentially) to the starting book.
But then, when I went back to check, I haven’t read The Museum of Modern Love at all. I got mixed up between that and my nearby art gallery, Heide, which is a Museum of Modern Art.
So my confusion gives me my starting book: The Strays by Emily Bitto (my review here), a fictional book which took its inspiration from John and Sunday’s life at Heide, which attracted modernist artists including Albert Tucker, Max Harris, Sidney Nolan, Barrett Reid, John Percival, the Boyds and Joy Hester to live communally in their farmhouse.
Although I read it long before I started this blog, I enjoyed Dear Sun, which was a collection of letters between Joy Hester and her friend and wealthy patron Sunday Reed from 1944 until Hester’s death in 1960. No fiction here: this is real life.
Speaking of artists, female artists Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith feature in Drusilla Modjeska’s book Stravinsky’s Lunch, which I also read before I started my blog.
Artists need someone to sit for them, and Alex Miller explores this in his small book The Sitters. I wrote about it in my review “ostensibly it is a slight story about an elderly painter and a younger female sitter [but] the ghosts of his childhood are sitting, too. There are multiple sitters, not just one, and he is painting them present from their absence.” (My review is here)
Or how about a book where the narrator is not the artist, but the work itself? That’s what Angela O’Keeffe rather bravely attempts in her book Night Blue, about Jackson Pollock’s painting ‘Blue Poles’ although I’m not sure that she actually succeeded. (My review here)
The painting in Cairo by Chris Womersley might not be one of the characters, but it certainly plays a role in the plot. Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’, one of the jewels of the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection, was stolen in real life in 1986, and it turns up in Womersley’s book which I just loved (as you can see in my review here).
Well, with three of these books set within 15 km of my home in Melbourne, I don’t seem to have moved very far this time!
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 