Parallel Lives
A fictional Canadian painter in post-war London takes her inspiration from Pierre Bonnard March 2015
A painting is a composition in shapes, textures and colours. A novel is a composition in language—which is flexible enough to include all of the above. A life can be a composition too, whose bits and pieces fit meaningfully together according to some principle of design. Painters and writers, while their common currency is structure, have long denied that their lives exhibit any particular aesthetic…