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Touching Quiet: Reflections in Solitude (Capital Discoveries)
Touching Quiet Reflections in Solitude - Capital Discoveries Author:Mindy Weisel TOUCHING QUIET is a gift to all who yearn for a pause, for time to reflect, and for balance in their lives. It is a busy, modern woman's record of what it feels like to live with quiet and solitude and beauty for one simple month of joyful creativity. May it serve as an inspiration to all. — In 1992, artist Mindy Weisel was given a one-month ... more »painting fellowship at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. TOUCHING QUIET is her inspiring journal kept during that summer month of quiet and painting. Away from the city, surrounded by 600 acres of Virginia country fields and a deep great silence, she was free (and challenged) to paint as much and whenever she chose. This lyrical journal explores the initial panic of a person whose entire creative life, over twenty years of painting, teaching. lecturing, and traveling, was wrapped around, not only as an artist, but as a wife, mother of three daughters, teacher, and writer. Faced with the sudden end of constant noise, acivity, and pressure we all experience daily, Ms. Weisel took the quiet and made it the subject of eachday's work. The quiet was always different and changing. On one day the quiet felt like a powerful, frightening storm and she painted A Storm of Solitude. On another, in response to the beauty outside her light-filled studio, we discover, through her art, the serene rural landscape that surrounded her. "I painted my heart out," she writes. "And with nowhere to run, I did touch quiet." Fourteen of the more than two dozen critically acclaimed paintings Ms. Weisel did at that time are featured in full-color in the book--visually tracing the pattern, sense of place, and understanding she found during this one momentous month of solitude. They allow us to experience this time with her and what she learned about life. "Never have I felt more fulfiled," she says. "This journal is a record of what it feels like to live with quiet and solitude and beauty. May it serve as an inspiration for anyone seeking a greater measure of balance, harmony, and creativity in their lives."« less