Blue Nude
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3.7 • 10 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Once a prominent painter, Danzig now shares his wisdom and technique with students at San Francisco’s Art Institute—yet his own canvases remain empty. When he meets Israeli-born Merav, the beautiful new model for his class, he senses she may reignite his artistic passion. Merav moved to California to escape the danger and violence of the Middle East, yet she cannot outrun her fears about the past. As the characters challenge one another, Rosner lyrically uncovers their disparate upbringings, their creative awakenings, and their similarly painful, often catastrophic, love lives to propel them toward reconciliation, redemption, and ultimately revival.
Customer Reviews
Blue Nude, by Elizabeth Rosner
It is quite impressive to have captured the feelings of both the model and painter in this piece. The little details, like the unwinding of the spiral apple peel, and the glimpses out windows in West Marin, how it feels to drive from SF into Marin when the sky opens up for you and the weather makes you feel differently. I love all these little moments in the book, perhaps more so that they story itself. What is it they say about the details being the real truth/reality?
Just as a painter is often capturing a moment in time with color and light, and expressing that one time or place they see visually... Rosner's writing really has tremendous power in the choice of these moments revealed to the reader. There are timeless questions that we all grapple with as we grow older, such as why is it so hard to let go a first true love, even after death? How do we honor a dead friend, or let go of someone who we can no longer help? How do we save ourselves when we know we need to move on, and change to begin again?
I love this book, and I love how Rosner chose to write about a painter and a model. I have been painting from models since I was very young, and there were so many characters I can distinctly remember, from RISD painting classes, all the props they used, and all the stories that could have come from all those bizarre props- umbrellas, oriental rugs, half torsos of manequins... it was like we they were placing a model in an odd flea market somewhere, hoping the artist would pull from it what they wanted, and leave the rest behind.
I never thought about the model at all, but just the shapes, lines, colors, form, movement, light and dark... I always just wanted to draw and capture what I saw as quickly as possible. Trying to capture the truth of what I saw... but how funny to think that the truth behind this is so much more. I never thought about what the models were thinking... that they had full lives, loves, kids, disasters...
Thank you for this book! Keep up the great work.