GLORIA VANDERBILT
Often my images are channeled in dreams which find expression in my paintings often in a narrative quality which has
been shuffled around in the kaleidoscope of my imagination to find themselves in colors and patterns that sustain me.
Memory is also a driving influence, memories I absorb and reinvent to changing effect because I have changed but do not
want to let them go. Color too intoxicates, inspires, so does the beauty of a person, who has something I can’t quite catch.
They become muses which I become obsessed to define, reveal something of their mystery.
Joyce Carol Oates – the beauty of Burne-Jones painting. The darkness of her hair crinkling
in a halo around the tenderness, the compassion, the intelligence of her face.
Amy Hempel – her mysterious beauty – the cloud of shimmering hair cascading around her as
a cloak to protect the pureness of her spirit which runs through her bloodstream like crystal water.
Aurelia Thierree – she moves on strange planes that girl – her catlike beauty, her delicacy,
her strength. Will I ever be able to capture it?
Carol Matthau who I have painted again and again. Aurelia who knew Carol remarked upon seeing “Carol and her Rose Garden,”“What was most peculiar was to recognize her intimately, but yet as it translates into a different language.
She was familiar still, visceral even, and yet she had entered Gloria’s world. Carol – her presence is in it, in a different
form. But it is her. Which is what defines a work of art, I suppose – you feel it is personal and familiar."
But most of all my inspiration is appetite for life – Mary Oliver’s poem comes to mind, “Messenger” begins, “My work is loving
the world.” As Amy Hempel has said, it is “a poem of the miraculous in the everyday…‘which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.’ How fascinating it is to find what influences and inspires, what is filtered out and becomes flotsam winding ‘somewhere safe to sea,’ and yet is never lost because it has found life in a story, a painting, a song.”
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