Gwyn Cready's Blog
November 10, 2014
Sirens of the Scottish Borderlands Series
My next book, Just in Time for a Highlander, comes out in February, 2015. It's the first book in my first-ever trilogy. The trilogy involves three women in the battle-ravaged borderlands of Scotland and England who enjoy unusual positions of power--one is a clan chieftess, one inherited a shipping business from her father and one is a fortune teller. Each needs a man, not for love, but to aid them in their work. They seek the help of the fortune teller, but when her magic goes awry, they find themselves with high-powered men from the twenty-first century, men whose skills mean little in 1705, rather than the strong-arms they seek[ In Just in Time for a Highlander, Duncan MacHarg, a Wall Street financier, must reinvent himself to win the heart and respect of Abby Kerr, clan chieftess.
[bookcover:Just in Time for a Highlander|21897474]
Just in Time for a Highlander
[bookcover:Just in Time for a Highlander|21897474]
Just in Time for a Highlander
April 22, 2009
My Next Book, due April 2010
In my next book (working title: Stripped Bare,) seventeenth-century painter Peter Lely comes back to life to settle the hash of Ava Stratford, the author of The Girl With a Coral Earring, whose series of sexy, tell-all biographies is driving the dead art world nuts. Lely has earned fame and wealth as the royal portraitist to Charles II, but his reputation has been made in the lush, intimate paintings he paints of the women of the court, whose half-lidded eyes and barely secured dressing room gowns suggest he's won more than their admiration. Ava is intent on baring his secrets in her next biography, and he's determined to stop her.
Since the book has a painting theme, and Ava is, in fact, a curator at an art museum, it's probably no surprise the plot touches on the work of a number of painters. I thought it might be fun to take a moment to introduce them to you.
First, of course, is Peter Lely, the hero. Peter was a real person and very little is known of his private life, which made him a lovely blank canvas on which to hang the story (notice how I call him Peter? After spending most of the last year writing Stripped Bare, I feel like I know him personally.)I've always wondered why women were willing to pose en dishabille for Peter. My theory is each fell in love a little bit with him--at least, that's the theory I posit in the story. There's just something about the gleam in their eyes. You can see what I'm talking about in Lely's Portrait of an Unknown Woman from the Tate Collection.
Next comes Anthony van Dyck. Lely inherited the position of court painter from van Dyck, who served under Charles II's father, Charles I. You can see the influence van Dyck had on Lely's work in this portrait.
Van Dyck's desire to hide the fact of his affair with Margaret Lemon provides the impetus for Lely to first travel to the future to seek out Ava.
In the story, certain parallels are drawn to Andrew Wyeth and his Helga pictures. In 1986, Wyeth revealed to the art world several hundred paintings and drawings of his neighbor, Helga Testorf, clothed and unclothed, that he'd created over the previous fourteen years without the knowledge of his wife or Helga's husband. The revelation and the collection caused quite a stir. Here's Helga.
In the future, Peter gets a peek at how the art world has changed in the last three hundered years. One painting that catches his eye is a Pierre Bonnard. Bonnard's wife, Marte, died young, and Bonnard painted her obsessively (384 times!) throughout the rest of his life, often in the midst of taking one of her much beloved baths. Bonnard's relationship with Marthe was quite dysfunctional, and his obsession with her worrisome to his circle of friends.
Finally, we have Alex Katz, a painter Ava greatly admires. Katz's wife, Ada, has been the subject of his paintings throughout their long marriage. In Katz's flat, color-soaked canvases, she is often portrayed as a loving mother or the object of his adoration, and fans of Katz's work have watched her age gracefully over the course of the last half century.
Five men. Five very different relationships with women. And Ava learns something from each of them as she finds herself unexpectedly falling for Peter.
Gwyn
www.cready.com
Get more on Gwyn Cready at SimonandSchuster.com
Since the book has a painting theme, and Ava is, in fact, a curator at an art museum, it's probably no surprise the plot touches on the work of a number of painters. I thought it might be fun to take a moment to introduce them to you.
First, of course, is Peter Lely, the hero. Peter was a real person and very little is known of his private life, which made him a lovely blank canvas on which to hang the story (notice how I call him Peter? After spending most of the last year writing Stripped Bare, I feel like I know him personally.)I've always wondered why women were willing to pose en dishabille for Peter. My theory is each fell in love a little bit with him--at least, that's the theory I posit in the story. There's just something about the gleam in their eyes. You can see what I'm talking about in Lely's Portrait of an Unknown Woman from the Tate Collection.
Next comes Anthony van Dyck. Lely inherited the position of court painter from van Dyck, who served under Charles II's father, Charles I. You can see the influence van Dyck had on Lely's work in this portrait.
Van Dyck's desire to hide the fact of his affair with Margaret Lemon provides the impetus for Lely to first travel to the future to seek out Ava.
In the story, certain parallels are drawn to Andrew Wyeth and his Helga pictures. In 1986, Wyeth revealed to the art world several hundred paintings and drawings of his neighbor, Helga Testorf, clothed and unclothed, that he'd created over the previous fourteen years without the knowledge of his wife or Helga's husband. The revelation and the collection caused quite a stir. Here's Helga.
In the future, Peter gets a peek at how the art world has changed in the last three hundered years. One painting that catches his eye is a Pierre Bonnard. Bonnard's wife, Marte, died young, and Bonnard painted her obsessively (384 times!) throughout the rest of his life, often in the midst of taking one of her much beloved baths. Bonnard's relationship with Marthe was quite dysfunctional, and his obsession with her worrisome to his circle of friends.
Finally, we have Alex Katz, a painter Ava greatly admires. Katz's wife, Ada, has been the subject of his paintings throughout their long marriage. In Katz's flat, color-soaked canvases, she is often portrayed as a loving mother or the object of his adoration, and fans of Katz's work have watched her age gracefully over the course of the last half century.
Five men. Five very different relationships with women. And Ava learns something from each of them as she finds herself unexpectedly falling for Peter.
Gwyn
www.cready.com
Get more on Gwyn Cready at SimonandSchuster.com
