A Painter’s Garden: Cultivating the Creative Life, by Christine Walker is one of my all-time favorite books. But don’t just take my word on it. Here are what other readers think.
*****
The parallels between lessons in the garden, the studio, and life in A Painter’s Garden ring true. Christine Walker’s writing is intelligent, evocative, elegant, and articulate.
She addresses universal truths about the creative process in an accessible and fresh way. And she renders very complex emotions in beautifully simple terms—weaving her experience of motherhood into an examination of her working methods in the studio, “feeling a cadence as measured as the breathing of a sleeping child.”
—Eleanor Coppola is an American documentary filmmaker, artist and writer. She is the director of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse and other documentaries. Eleanor is the writer and director of the romantic comedies Paris Can Wait and Love is Love is Love. She is the author of Notes on a Life and Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now. Her visual art is shown in galleries and museums.
*****
In A Painter’s Garden, Christine Walker weaves a fine filigree of dreams from tiny seeds. This is a book that reminds us that the tools for creation are always at hand: that we can begin with a spade or a brush, a poem, or a meal. For Walker, life and art come from and flow back into the earth.
Her paintings are brilliant, explosive, nearly surreal in their ability to capture the unmodified light of visions and dreams. Like bounty of her garden, this book calms the mind and reassures the soul.”
—Mary Mackey is an American poet, novelist, and academic. She is the author of eight collections of poetry and fourteen novels. The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems 1974 to 2018. Mary won the 2019 Eric Hoffer Small Press Award for the best book published by a small press. She was one of the founders of the English Department Graduate Creative Writing Program at California State University, Sacramento.
*****
What a happy book! Christine Walker celebrates the flow of creative energy from the earth transformed by inspiration to her chosen medium of pigment. She shows what harmony feels like. This is a beautiful and joyous book, celebrating the creative spirit in nature and its transformation into an expressive medium.
—Arlene Bernstein is a psychotherapist and author of Growing Season: A Healing Journey into the Heart of Nature and Growing Season: Life Lessons from the Garden.
*****
WRITERS FORUM
Christine Walker will facilitate two free workshops, “Writing Resilient.”
During these Zoom Forums, Christine will talk about “Masterful Ways to Transform Our Stories: The ones we’re writing, the ones we’re living.”
Two Saturdays: March 20 and March 27, 10 am to 12 noon, Pacific Time.
The Zoom URL will be posted in a few days on The Writers Forum page of The Write Spot website.
There is no registration nor sign-ups for Writers Forum.
