When art and artists inspire literature
Susan Vreeland, based on the West Coast of the US, lives partly in the world of European painting. Her novels and stories, which have been translated into many languages and made her hugely popular, draw their subject matter largely from the art history of Europe. Vreeland made the general public aware of the case of the painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1651), the first woman accepted into the Accademia dell’Arte in Florence; she wrote about the heyday of Flemish painters, and now she has brought the people in a famous painting by Renoir to life as fictional heroes. Prior to that, she wrote a novel on the life of the Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871-1945) which even boosted tourism in British Columbia. Diigisi Publishers have brought out two of her novels in Greek simultaneously: «The Passion of Artemisia» (translated by Rena Hathut) and «The Girl in Hyacinth Blue» (translated by Viki Lingri). From Italian Baroque to the Flemish scene, Vreeland writes her novels after extensive research, following, or perhaps setting, an international trend she believes has a long history.
