“I can
only note that the past is beautiful because one ever realizes an emotion at
the time. It expands later, and
thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
Virginia Woolf
All during this current month of September, I've been remembering a beautiful past September in 2004. I was leaving my Silverado Canyon garden for England, and beginning a journey to research and write a book. I was searching for Vanessa Bell. Staying in the Bloomsbury area of London, I sought her everywhere...gazing out an upstairs window, crossing busy Bedford Place, taking tea in Russell Square. She had moved to the same area one hundred years before, in 1904. On my way to the British Library every morning, I walked past other leafy gardens and past 46 Gordon Square. I imagined her easel and paints among spare bedroom furnishings and light streaming in, onto white distempered walls. I spent long days in the British Library, pouring over biographies, memoirs, art reviews and more. I spent rainy afternoons in the dusty basement of the Courtauld puzzling over long ago and faded art exhibition catalogs. I often wanted to ask her, why this blue, why that line and composition, why the Matisse like high-keyed color there? Virginia Woolf once wrote, "Mrs. Bell says nothing. Mrs. Bell is as silent as the grave." But, I beg to differ. Woolf was wrong. Vanessa Bell spoke to me. This enigmatic, resilient, and experimental painter captured my curiosity, my heart, and my imagination. The book was published eleven years later in 2015.
