Authors: Sarah Andrews
Earth Colors (36 page)
Killer Dust
Fault Line
An Eye for Gold
Bone Hunter
Only Flesh and Bones
Mother Nature
A Fall in Denver
Tensleep
Fault Line
An Eye for Gold
Bone Hunter
Only Flesh and Bones
Mother Nature
A Fall in Denver
Tensleep
I am interested in art for the same reasons I am interested in geology, and in fact the art came first. My dad was an artist, as was his mother before him. Tutelage began even before I could hold a crayon, because the creative process was right there in front of me, happening on a grand scale.
My grandmother, Dorothy Warren Andrews, studied art at Yale and with Howard Pyle at the Brandywine School. She was an excellent portraitist and could draw splendidly. When she married, she set aside her oils, and did not pick them up again until she was widowed. She was an aesthete who arranged all objects around her harmoniously. She and her sister lived in New York City during the spring and fall, kept a cottage in the Bahamas for the coldest winter months, and, during long summers at the family farm in Maine, painted trays, sewed, braided and hooked rugs, and kept the aging woodwork in perfect nick. She was also a wonderful cook who brought beauty to the science of baking deep-dish blueberry pies.
I recall one moment with her that is worth telling a thousand times. I was perhaps eleven or twelve, and visiting her at the farm. We sat in the kitchen at opposite ends of the old wooden table at which three additional generations of our ancestors had sat. A peaceful afternoon light played through the room, and the air was pervaded with the scent of applesauce and the patient tick-tock of the old regulator clock. I was drawing a picture of a lovely young female with a beautiful dress, and my grandmother, who dressed better than about any woman I knew, looked right past that and saw that I had drawn the hands way too small.
“Sally,” she said, getting me to look up. I did. Keeping her face completely empty of any judgment or criticism, she raised one of her fine,
artistic hands and placed it against her face, putting the heel against her chin and showing me that the fingertips reached clear to her hairline. I had her lesson at a glance and got at it with both ends of my pencil, starting with the eraser. And loved her even more deeply.
artistic hands and placed it against her face, putting the heel against her chin and showing me that the fingertips reached clear to her hairline. I had her lesson at a glance and got at it with both ends of my pencil, starting with the eraser. And loved her even more deeply.
Dad—Richard Lloyd Andrews—painted in oils, and he sometimes let me watch as he paced up and back in front of his big wooden easel. He was a big man, six-foot-five in his stocking feet, handsome with his dark hair, blue eyes, and lantern jaw, and given to a mischievous, dramatic air, so the show of watching him enthralled in his creative process was exactly that—theater. He worked his jaw muscles as he paced, and occasionally picked up a small mirror and stood across the room from his painting to squint at it from another perspective. He studied at Black Mountain College (he is one of its few graduates) with Josef Albers, and after his stint as a sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Corps during the Second World War (during which he paid visits to such artists as Georges Braque), he studied with Hans Hoffman at the Art Student’s League.
I was Dad’s sidekick. He often took me with him into New York, where I took pride in walking beside him down the sidewalks—he had the great, rhythmic stride of a dancer, and wore a great coat, Stetson, and tartan necktie, and smoked a pipe upside down in the rain—as we systematically hit the art shows he had marked in his copy of
The New Yorker
as we rode in on the New York Central Railroad. He always carried a clipboard, fat drawing pencils, and later calligraphic pens, and he’d put the magazine on the clipboard and fish drawing and writing instruments out of his inside coat pocket as needed, sometimes placing those instruments inside the cardboard case his pipe cleaners came in. As we made the rounds of the galleries and museums, he’d tell me stories about the artists, many of whom he knew from school, and when I saw the movie
Pollack
many years later, it was old home week.
The New Yorker
as we rode in on the New York Central Railroad. He always carried a clipboard, fat drawing pencils, and later calligraphic pens, and he’d put the magazine on the clipboard and fish drawing and writing instruments out of his inside coat pocket as needed, sometimes placing those instruments inside the cardboard case his pipe cleaners came in. As we made the rounds of the galleries and museums, he’d tell me stories about the artists, many of whom he knew from school, and when I saw the movie
Pollack
many years later, it was old home week.
Dad was a brilliant eclectic. Not only did his paintings comprise a fine and legitimate body of work, but he also built model railroads (he and a friend developed ON2 gauge and he served the Model Railroad Society as gauge specialist. Many will remember him as the author of countless articles for
Model Railroader, Railroad Modeler,
and
The Narrow Gauge Gazette
) and designed and built multi-hull sailboats (there his outlet was
The Journal of the Amateur Yacht Research Society
). I accompanied him on a great many of his sailing trips, on water spring through fall, and ice
boating when the Hudson River froze over in winter, and rode narrow-gauge railroads with him on two continents.
Model Railroader, Railroad Modeler,
and
The Narrow Gauge Gazette
) and designed and built multi-hull sailboats (there his outlet was
The Journal of the Amateur Yacht Research Society
). I accompanied him on a great many of his sailing trips, on water spring through fall, and ice
boating when the Hudson River froze over in winter, and rode narrow-gauge railroads with him on two continents.
Always on these outings, he carried that clipboard, and brought one along for me, too, and we sat drawing together, he sketching landscapes that would grow into paintings, and I dreaming on paper. I got pretty good at drawing. Very early in life I was anointed She Who Will Carry On the Tradition, and applied to art schools. I got into a very good one. And I did not go. Why? My grandmother’s sister was Constance Warren, who, as president of Sarah Lawrence College, built it from a two-year finishing school to the Seven Sisters wonderment it became. She took me aside one day and said, “Sarah, it’s all very nice that you wish to develop your artistic talent. But what will happen if you go all the way through your training and discover that you have nothing to say? Wouldn’t it be better if you first get a good liberal-arts education and then go to art school?”
I pounced on her idea. On the face of it, it was unassailable logic, but I will here admit that there was more to my decision than that: At eighteen, I was quite intimidated by the idea of being around nothing but really talented artists, and at the same time, felt oddly done with all that. I had put together a portfolio that was complete and accomplished enough to get me into art school, and that was indeed enough. I was ready to learn something else.
That something proved to be geology. I had shown a precocious knack for it in fifth grade, when my teacher, Miss Lucas, took us on field trips looking for minerals and had us draw—yes, draw; geology uses the same parts of the brain as art—folds and faults and the innards of volcanoes. My uncle Jack Ferry took me “rock hounding” as well, scrambling over the mine dumps that dotted Maine’s pegmatitic granites. And I had gone looking for big micas with Dad, which he used, peeled into thin sheets, as the glazing in the windows of the parlor cars on his model railroads. But when I got to Colorado College—that good liberal arts joint that had a late enough admissions application deadline to serve as a good landing spot after Great-aunt Con nudged me off my original path—I still thought that “girls” could not study science (yeah, 1969 was back in the Pleistocene, and there were woolly mammoths eating daisies in front of my dormitory). I had to take a couple of science courses to qualify for that liberal arts B.A., so I signed up for geology that first term to get it out of my way, and … that was my only A that semester. The rest is history.
I have now also earned an M.S. and have enjoyed three decades working in the rock trades. Where did the writing come from? Well … as a product of that “good liberal arts education,” I see no real boundaries between the disciplines, and so found no reason not to start writing mystery novels about geology when the creative itch struck for about the fifth time. I must credit my father (in his eclectic brilliance also a storyteller of the first water) and my great-aunt’s master plan, not to mention my mother, Mary Fisher Andrews, who read aloud to me, and, as my sixth-grade English teacher, taught me the structure of language with all the trimmings (essay writing, sentence diagramming, and
Gawain and the Green Knight
), and her father (Stephen Joseph Herben, Professor of English Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College). All of these fine family teachers taught me one lesson above all: There are no boundaries or limits to what I could do. That bit about girls and science must have come from someone else.
Gawain and the Green Knight
), and her father (Stephen Joseph Herben, Professor of English Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College). All of these fine family teachers taught me one lesson above all: There are no boundaries or limits to what I could do. That bit about girls and science must have come from someone else.
This is the ninth Em Hansen forensic geology mystery novel. So, why did I write about art? The obvious reason is as a salute to a family tradition. It was darned lucky for me that they were there, because I am dyslexic, and in a great many other families I would have been labeled stupid. In mine, I was called various other things (underachiever, ornery … ) but never stupid. Dad, Granny, and Aunt Con were always there beaming their approval and interest in everything I did, and Mother always expected me to dive headfirst into whatever career engaged my mind.
Geology has certainly done that: It is in fact an intellectual playground for me. I was born with the talent for four-dimensional thinking (a geologist thinks in the three dimensions of space and projects it forwards and backwards through time. My dyslexia, or trouble decoding linear/sequential text, is on the flip side of being able to take in discontinuous—often ambiguous—data in random order and build space-time models from it. Not a bad trade, if you ask me).
But I found other reasons to write about art. First, art and science are, to me, parts of a whole, and I prefer my universe as fully integrated as I can make it. Second, all the while I was whacking rocks with a hammer, the love of art for art’s sake was in my heart. And third, deep down inside I was a chicken. That other reason for not going to art school really had to do, among other things, with color: I could not handle it. I could draw, but I could not paint. Not really. Not like my dad and grandmother could. Yes,
they studied with the masters to develop their skills, and if I had gone to art school I might have gotten there, too. But I did not, and it has always bugged me. So a couple of years ago—yeah, after Dad died and was no longer there to notice if I did it badly—I took up drawing with pastels, kind of a hybrid between drawing and painting. And I noticed that I was holding geology in my hands, all ground up and compressed into sticks that I could rub onto a piece of paper to create art.
they studied with the masters to develop their skills, and if I had gone to art school I might have gotten there, too. But I did not, and it has always bugged me. So a couple of years ago—yeah, after Dad died and was no longer there to notice if I did it badly—I took up drawing with pastels, kind of a hybrid between drawing and painting. And I noticed that I was holding geology in my hands, all ground up and compressed into sticks that I could rub onto a piece of paper to create art.
With love,
Sarah Andrews, still a student
November 11, 2003
EARTH COLORS. Copyright
© 2004 by Sarah Andrews Brown.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
eISBN 9781466818071
First eBook Edition : April 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Andrews, Sarah.
Earth colors / Sarah Andrews.—1st St. Martin’s Minotaur ed. p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-30197-9 EAN 978-0312-30197-2
1. Hansen, Em (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Remington, Frederic, 1861–1909—Appreciation—Fiction. 3. Painting—Forgeries—Fiction. 4. Forensic geology—Fiction. 5. Women geologists—Fiction. 6. West (U. S.)—Fiction.
7. Poisoning—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3551.N4526E26 2004
813’.54—dc22
2003058683
First Edition: April 2004
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