Behind The Scenes: Modern Art and The Art of Lying

Today I’d like to share with you another look Behind the Scenes of The Art of Lying and talk about my love for Modern Art and how it influenced my main character, Rachel.

  Rachel is a young artist on the verge of a big break and her own gallery show.  I love visiting museums and art galleries and our apartment will have plenty of art on its walls once we get fully moved in (it’s only been, like, a year - whatever).  My love for the art world, especially modern art, is one of the biggest reasons Rachel spoke to me.  When she appeared in my brain - because, for some odd reason, most of my stories start with the main character first - I knew she was an artist immediately.  It was the thing that identified her so clearly, her whole persona.  It’s what made me so excited to start this novel, and what has kept me working on her and it for years.  (YEARS, people!)

My three favorite modern artists are Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, and Alexander Calder. Besides being dubbed Modern Art, they all have one thing in common - bright, bold colors. I’m not a beige person, my favorite color is red followed closely by blue, yellow, and green - bright, bold colors is seriously my thing. Rachel is also not a beige person.  She wears black a lot, sure, but her art is all about color.  She describes her art as being in the Pop Style, like Andy Warhol, but because of my passion for clean lines, bold colors, and movement in art, she definitely has touches of those in her paintings as well.

Rachel meets another artist, a smaller character named Cassandra, who also would consider herself a modern artist but her pieces are very different - she makes modern day quilts. Bright, bold colored fabric is used to make faces and landscapes of the New York City skyline.  She blends the traditional art of quilting with her love of modern day art techniques to pen a love story of the people and city that surround her.  I loved being able to create two very different characters and styles of art to explore in this novel.  

Exploring my passions, like painting and art in general, is one of my favorite things about writing.  I love modern art, I can write about it.  I love the circus and the world of performers, I can write about it (hint hint).  I love families and how they work together (or not), how they solve problems (or not), and how they communicate (or not) within crisis so that’s what I write about.  They say write about what you know, but I say write about what you love.   Just because I myself can’t paint or sculpt or quilt doesn’t mean I can’t read and write about it.  

Who is your favorite artist?  Do you like the old masters? Classics? Sculpture?  And if you are a writer, do you put your passions and hobbies into your stories? Do you write what you know or what you love?