Susan Vreeland Quotations

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that.

When I was nine, my great grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper.

Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds.

'Luncheon of the Boating Party,' owned by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., has served Americans as a symbol of France and French culture, both of which I love, and is as evocative and triumphant an image as that other emissary of France, the Statue of Liberty.

Whatever it is that can help to bring God close is something to be revered.

To feel the grace of God in a painting of the dear, quiet commonness of a domestic interior, or in a landscape, seascape, cityscape, trains us to feel the grace of God in the thing itself in situ.

I absorbed as many Impressionist paintings as I could, in Parisian museums and in many museums in the United States and in books, looking for clues to architecture, clothing, settings.

I write about art out of gratitude to painters for the joy and spiritual uplift they have given me. Painters interpret for us the visual glories of God and, in this way, bring us closer to Him.

Landscape is more than flat land covered by floodwater, the seeping of peat bogs, a river of liquid pewter viewed from a sentry tower. It's an influence on what a person values, what she is willing to sacrifice or argue for.

I suppose it's easier for most writers to create and vivify characters of their own gender.

Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle did more to emancipate women than any other single thing. The bicycle was linked in the psyches of women at that time as a symbol of practical emancipation. Women could go places, wear their skirts shorter to manage the bicycle, and be independent.

I would like to bring people who have never been to a museum into a museum. And I would like to bring museum goers into libraries. I think there ought to be this cross-fertilization.

When I think how art education is eliminated whenever we get a budget crunch in the schools, I have to stand up and say that even when there was dire poverty ten blocks away from Tiffany Studios in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was art and creativity within.

When I learned that near Roussillon there were ochre quarries and mines from which was extracted the ore which produced pigments in all the warm hues of the color wheel, I had a substantial artistic link to this region beyond mere love.

When I see Tiffany windows in churches across the United States, I get a sense of spiritual upliftment from that.

Two of my grandfathers had been artists, lifelong oil painters, so I was exposed to art very young. I've always been interested in it, although I never pursued it as a career or even as an avocation.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.

Each time we enter imaginatively into the life of another, it's a small step upwards in the elevation of the human race.

I ventured into fiction in 1988 with 'What Love Sees,' a biographical novel of a woman's unwavering determination to lead a full life despite blindness.

The Tiffany lamp is an American icon bridging the immigrants, settlement houses, and the slums of the Lower East Side and the wealthy industrialists of upper Manhattan, the Gilded Age and its excesses.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

After one hundred days of confinement following a bone marrow transplant, I rejoiced in taking short walks to a nearby park as I was writing 'Girl in Hyacinth Blue.' The uncertainty of my survival made every blade of grass gorgeous in its green intensity, lifting itself up, doing its part to make the world beautiful.

Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion.

Archival and published history does not always record personal relationships of historical figures, so characters must be invented to allow the subject to reveal their interior realm through intimate interaction.

Art history looks at art works and the people who have created them.

As New York careens toward the modernity of the twentieth century when Gibson girls were transforming themselves into working women, Clara Driscoll enters the male field of stained glass artistry and builds a lively, multi-national, multi-class women's department within Tiffany Studios.

It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting.

For a century, everyone assumed that the iconic Tiffany lamps were conceived and designed by that American master of stained glass. Not so! It was a woman!

I wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive in my heart.

The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.

I made my personal discovery of Emily Carr while visiting Victoria in 1981 to write a travel article. Immediately, her strong colors attracted me; her spunk fascinated me. Her down-to-earth voice in her writing appealed to me as authentic and original.

I'm hoping that I make readers into museum goers and museum goers into readers.

I pored over art books and absorbed the placidness of Monet's garden, the sparkling color of the Impressionists, the strength and solidity of Michelangelo's figures showing the titanic power of humans at one with God, Jan Vermeer's serene Dutch women bathed in gorgeous honey-colored light... My conviction grew that art was stronger than death.

I don't know if a historian or scholar owns an opinion.

I could say diamonds are a girl's best friend, and that never changes. But the taste for art did change.

Color has always been important to me, ever since my first deluxe box of Crayolas.

The idea of being close to where pigments were mined - that's the first thing in making a painting, getting the material. And what's the last thing you do in making a painting? You put a frame around it.

The gift art gives us is that instead of seeing only our own world, we see into other times, which offers a window into other cultures and sensibilities.

The company, Tiffany Studios, ended up in bankruptcy in 1930 - early '30s.

God taking from us and loving us at the same time by providing comforters was a kind of spiritual equanimity. It seemed a phenomenon of life how a death insinuates us into the debt of those who stand by us in trouble and console us.

Look long enough, out or in, and you’ll be glad you are who you are.

I remember being disappointed when Papa had shown me Caravaggio's Judith. She was completely passive while she was sawing through a man's neck. Caravaggio gave all the feeling to the man. Apparently, he couldn't imagine a woman to have a single thought. I wanted to paint her thoughts, if such a thing were possible -- determination and concentration and belief in the absolute necessity of the act. The fate of her people resting on her shoulders...

Think hard before you begin, then enter the work.

What the world calls failure, I call learning.

Everybody works . . . . That's what life is. Work and a little play and a lot of prayer.

If two people love the same thing, she reasoned, then they must love each other, at least a little, even if they never say it.

He and I had a bridge that no one else traveled that made us artistic lovers, passionate without a touch of the flesh. He made me thrive, and valuing that, I could do nothing that would endanger it.

That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains.

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials--I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered--it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.

You know, bicycling isn't just a matter of balance," I said. "it's a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. I'm going to call that the Bicyclist's Philosophy of Life.