where art and literacy meet

this coming august 25th I’ll be the featured author at the Literacy Action Center’s annual fundraiser hosted by local Utah artist Pilar Pobil.

I visited her home and gardens last month to introduce myself and spend some time becoming familiar with the setting for the event, which is her gracious home and gardens in the avenues area of salt lake city. Pilar, born and schooled in Spain, chose utah for her home decades ago, and has become one of our communities beloved treasures.

in the presence of a visual artist, I am humbled. my palette consists of only black and white, and is essentially limited to 26 characters. I visualize color, my mind swept with vibrant hues, subtle shades, earthy depths and translucent, tinted waves . . . but on the paper, on the screen, I am limited to recognized configurations of those 26 letters.

however, when I read, I reverse the process I use to write, and words leap into color, shape, form, an explosion of visual creativity inside my mind. the pure pleasure of this process is incredible, almost inexplicable ~ because I can read, my mind is filled with images of people and places, with vistas, with kitchens and barns and great halls and roads, with rivers and mountainsides and a lookout tower in glacier national park, with creatures and mythical beasts, lovers and gnomes, secret gardens and libraries filled with walls of books and hidden passages to foreign lands.

I, too, am a visual artist.

when one learns to read, one is immediately and permanently a visual artist, a painter, a photographer, a designer of scenes and costumes, landscapes and people. an entire world opens, the mind is set afire, and nothing is ever the same.

please join me august 25th at the home of Pilar Pobil, 403 east 8th avenue, in salt lake city.

for more information:  Literacy Action Center 801.265.9081