Objects of Desire: An Artist in Venice

A contemporary painter finds inspiration in Venice, where the canals, art, and architecture guide her thoughts on female desire, love, grief, and memory in this hybrid work of creative nonfiction. Alone in Venice for an artist's residency, Celia Paul began keeping an ongoing record of her painting. Objects of Desire is a mesmerizing account of her perceptions in La Serenissima and of her preoccupations there: female desire and love, mortality, and memory. "Venice resembles a collective brain," Paul writes, "where other people's lives--past and present--are transmitted like signals to my own." In the reflections of the floating city, Paul finds traces of her last visit with her late husband; in the work of Venetian artists Carpaccio and Giotto, forceful depictions of her own emotions; and in the allusive painting La Tempesta by Giorgione, a key to her complex feelings about the past. Objects of Desire is a radiant record of a life devoted to art, a profound portrait of an artist who longs to confront herself and who invites the reader to do the same.