Notes From An Exhibition

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Notes From An Exhibition

Notes From An Exhibition

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I discovered that not only had she once taught, like Rachel, in West Cornwall School for Girls, but that she had enjoyed several rather scary encounters with Dame Barbara Hepworth. I had been fretting about the degree to which Rachel should interact with the real life painters of St Ives and Newlyn and, by writing her stories down for me, this kind woman gave me the key I needed, those few intimate physical details that would let me make Hepworth a sort of ambiguous demon in Rachel’s life, both inspiration and tormentor. Gale writes novels that are like beautiful patchwork quilts; they come folded and every reveal brings new detail and intrigue…

Notes from an Exhibition takes its title from the information cards displayed beside works of art in a gallery or museum. Each chapter in the novel begins with a different example, all of them referring Kelly’s art or possessions. We never see examples of her work but it is described in detail and a cumulative effect of the novel is the reader’s sense that they are walking around a retrospective of her art. Poised and pitch-perfect throughout, this is an engrossing portrait of a troubled and remarkable character. A fine writer at the top of his game. This is a book full of insight, intelligence and quiet humour familiar from his previous masterpiece, Rough Music.The complex personality of Rachel had already taken shape in my head, and I already knew she would end up working on the fringes of the artistic community of St Ives, when I quite by chance met an old friend’s mother after talking about my novel, Friendly Fire at the Cambridge Book Festival. Each chapter reflects in some way the object or art work that the curatorial voice describes at its outset, sometimes directly, sometimes in some enigmatic way. There’s a sense that the curator’s notes give us the official version, the art gives us another and the piece of narrative that follows yet another. The messy, human truth lies somewhere in between all three.

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies raving in her attic studio in Penzance, her saintly husband and adult children have more than the usual mess to clear up. She leaves behind her paintings of genius – but she leaves also a legacy of secrets and emotional damage it will take months to unravel. The usual post-mortem business of recycling vast quantities of letters and drawers of old clothes escalated when she decided to snatch the chance to move from a flat which now seemed far too big for her to a perfect but much smaller house just around the corner.A similar quirk of fate would put me in touch with a fan of my work who just happened to have been a patient in Toronto ’s psychiatric hospital at exactly the period I needed to evoke in the novel.) It’s a great shame that so few of the old artist’s studios in West Cornwall have survived without being turned into luxury holiday homes.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
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