Joanne Freeman didn’t have to look far for the inspiration for her recently published short story “Family Portrait” — no farther, in fact, than across the street from her Wilmette home.
Freeman’s story is one of five collected in “Visions of Life,” a new book from Evanston-based Crow Woods Publishing, each suggested by a work of art from one of the company’s three previous books devoted to the work of Chicago-area artists. And the writer was already intimately familiar not only with her friend and neighbor Mary Gingrich’s painting, but also with the subject of her portrait “Girl with a Violin.”
“I’ve written a lot of stories for myself, but I haven’t published widely,” said Freeman, a freelance writer and editor. “So when Mary called to tell me about this book and to ask me to write a story, I hemmed and hawed but then finally decided to do it.”
The book was the brainchild of Ivy Sundell, who has been generating art books and historical fiction since Crow Woods’ first book in 1997. So far, she has published three collections of local art — “The Chicago Art Scene,” “Art Scene, Chicago 2000” and “Living Artists” — each featuring the work of roughly 70 artists.
“It dawned on me that everyone who looks at a piece of art sees it with a different vision,” Sundell said. “And I started thinking it would be interesting to have people write about what they were seeing — not just description-wise, but in a narrative form.”
As a result, Sundell decided to solicit original stories based on the work in her previous books and to publish the best submissions, along with the art that inspired them, in “Visions of Life.” She proposed the idea in writing workshops and writing sites and also asked her artists to share the news with friends who were writers. She received 17 entries, all judged by novelist and Indiana University professor Tony Ardizzone.
Freeman’s, in fact, was one of three submissions inspired by Gingrich’s “Girl with a Violin.” But she may have had an advantage since she first saw the painting a couple of decades before her competitors. The “Girl” in the painting is Gingrich’s daughter Dawn — now an accomplished professional violinist — at the age of 9, when Freeman had already known her for years.
However, the story she wrote about the painting had nothing to do with Dawn at all.
“I’ve always found the portrait very interesting because it seemed to me to have sort of a dark quality,” Freeman said. “And for some reason it made me think of family, particularly the Italian side of my family.”
If Dawn could be said to appear in the story at all, it’s as the inspiration for a little girl with a heart condition, who died while her older sister was supposed to be watching her, causing her mother to blame the older girl for her death. And leading to a dramatic confrontation when the mother (modeled on Freeman’s Italian-born grandmother) asks the older sister to come home and care for her in her old age.
How did Freeman arrive at such a tale given such seemingly singularly unrelated source material?
“It’s complicated,” she said with a laugh. But, as the saying goes, every picture tells a story.
‘Visions of Life’ signing with Ivy Sunell
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6-7:30 p.m. July 24
Bookends and Beginnings, 1712 Sherman Ave., Evanston