The Story Behind the Story

The Painter

The Painter began back in the early 1990s as quite another book. I'd planned an adult novel with just a chapter concerning the Dutch painter, Vincent Van Gogh's prolific period while he was living in the Yellow House in Arles in the south of France. As it happened, my husband John and I were to live in Holland for a while. My Dutch publisher had found a wonderful apartment on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam for us, and when we'd settled into living there, I found a small corner for my computer and prepared to go to work. I set off to the wonderful Van Gogh Museum most weekdays to study the art works of course (always something new to discover) but more to the point, to go downstairs to the impressive Van Gogh library to do some research. In the evenings I'd relate to John the incredible discoveries I'd made. For example, I learned that Vincent met in Paris and later corresponded with an Australian artist, John Russell. What a surprise to learn that Australia had its own artist mixing on the Left Bank with the Impressionists, and later exchanging ideas and paintings with Vincent. As weeks turned into months, I became more and more engrossed with the life of this troubled, restless and inspired artist, Vincent. I began to wander from my original idea of just a chapter on his time in Arles to thinking about a young French youth who might meet the strange yet gargantuan artist, face to face in Arles. This would be a boy who was struggling with his own artwork, in fact his own identity, as he faced crises at home and at school. He would meet the erratic Van Gogh and then what would happen? I found I was on the trail of another book altogether. It was to be five years before I took up the story again and found the same sense of wonder, revisiting Vincent's amazing letters which detailed his paintings so fully. But my new character Bernard, began to take centre stage. I began to weave the factual events of Vincent's sad time towards the end of his stay in the Yellow House, with my imagined Bernard's own rapidly changing life. And so the novel The Painter was born.
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