Find My Friends: It's More than an App

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a mystery writer in possession of a good idea, must be in want of a friend or two.” – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, the first line, a little adapted. 

With the Left Coast Crime mystery conference coming up in February, author friends are beginning to make plans -- for coffee, for dinners, for co-hosting banquet tables. When I think back to the very first LCC I went to, when I hardly knew anyone, something inside my ribs goes soft. For one of the great untold secrets about being a writer is the people you meet who help you along the way.

Tonight I'm going to a friend's house to do a book club for my 2019 novel, A Trace of Deceit, about a young woman artist in London, in 1875. And I think about how this novel would have been a misinformed disaster, full of what I thought I knew about art, except that I had two artist friends, who, when I asked, generously opened their hearts and minds to me. 

Inevitably a novel comes together like a stew, with ingredients from all different shelves in the kitchen.

For this book, set in the 1870s London art and auction world, Ingredient #1 was my experience working at Christie’s auction house in New York, in the scandal-filled 1990s.  

Ingredient #2 was the true story of the Pantechnicon, a warehouse where the wealthy of London stored their art and household valuables. It burned down in February 1874, destroying millions of pounds worth of irreplaceable masterworks and antiques.

Ingredient #3 was a painting worth stealing. I chose one of François Boucher’s paintings of Madame de Pompadour, the official chief mistress of King Louis XV from 1745 to 1751. 

Ingredient #4 were the biographies of two brilliant Victorian women artists—Evelyn de Morgan (https://www.demorgan.org.uk/discover/the-de-morgans/evelyn-de-morgan/) and Kate Greenaway (https://www.societyillustrators.org/kate-greenaway)—who attended the Slade School of Art in London in the 1870s. Their experiences served as a pattern for my heroine, Annabel Rowe, a student at the Slade School in 1875. (Here, a photo of an early class.)

But for the way Annabel thinks and speaks, for the metaphors she uses, for the way she looks at her world and describes it in words, I knew I needed to find an artist with a beating heart.

Fortunately, I have two longtime friends in Phoenix who are artists. One of them, Heidi Dauphin, has been a friend and fellow hiker since she arrived in Phoenix over twenty years ago. She works primarily in handmade ceramic tile, and her public art is scattered around town, including at the Heard Museum; neighborhoods in Avondale, Goodyear, and Tempe; the Valley Metro Light Rail TPSS building at Glendale and 19th Avenue; the Pinnacle Peak Water Reservoir in Phoenix, and elsewhere. Currently the Exhibition Manager at the Shemer Art Center in Phoenix, Heidi arranges and installs all the exhibitions and select the jurors for their juried shows. Find her on instagram @heididauphin and on her website www.heididauphin.com.

My other friend, Hallie Mueller, is the head art teacher at Phoenix Country Day School. She came to Arizona when she was 21 and was captivated by the desert landscape, which inspired her expansive, vivid paintings. Some years ago, while rock climbing, she fell 60 feet off a cliff, sustaining injuries that she has recovered from, but which transformed her art and her approach to life and creativity. You can find her paintings and more information at www.halliemueller.com. These two friends guided me while I developed the character of Annabel into a living, breathing painter, with an artist’s sensibility. Most of my conversations with Heidi took place on hiking trails over many years, as I learned about her time as an undergraduate and a graduate student, how she worked in the studio, and how she developed her craft. Her reflections and insights provided the broad strokes, the underpainting of my portrait of Annabel Rowe.

The details for that portrait came one night over a long dinner with Hallie. I still have my scribbled notes from that meeting, dated 2/25/19. I asked the basic, first question: “How does Annabel think about a painting?”

Hallie began by talking about compositional options—overlap, cropping, size variation and distance, angles, and foreshortening. She explained that there is a focal point, which is the thing that first grabs attention; then visual pathways, implied lines that you can create, for example, through repetition of a color that can lead the eye around the canvas. Shapes can function as arrows, as can the direction of the gazes of people in the picture. Where they are looking matters. (I found myself thinking … hm, this holds true in novels, too.) She walked me through oil painting, underpainting, and glazes; tightness (say, Titian) versus looseness (the Impressionists). She explained the importance of the “light source” and illumination; think of Caravaggio’s windows. And she explained that with colors, there are different degrees of saturation, and they aren’t really “fixed”; for example, browns change depending on what they are next to. Oils come in tubes; a flat brush will give you sharp edges whereas a bright brush, with the oval top, is good for blending; a round brush and fan brush will give you still different effects. As for smells? Linseed oil, which makes paint less viscous; Damar varnish, which adds gloss and enriches darks; turpentine, which weakens the integrity of paint. There was more, but this gives you an idea.

When I finished the book, there were three significant scenes where Annabel paints or reads a painting. I talked them through with Heidi and sent them to Hallie to read. I received comments from readers who wrote to me, “I’m an artist, and you got it right.”

If I got it right, it's because I got my friends. 

Writers -- have you ever collaborated in your creative work?