White Oleander

I just finished the book White Oleander by Janet Fitch. It's an amazing book that everyone should read. In this book, the main character, Astrid, is quite the artist. I love the way that Fitch portrays how she thinks and feels about art. In this quote below, Astrid talks about how the world was made to be comprehended through art. It is very beautiful both in content and what words Fitch uses.


"I gazed down at my drawing of Rena, dotted with water from the sprinkler. Really, I didn't even like drawings. When I went to the museum, I looked at paintings, sculptures, anything but lines on a piece of paper. It was just that my hand needed something to do, my eye needed a reason to shape the space between Rena an the sprinkler she had running and her wobbly-legged tabel of rusted white diamond mesh that held one drink and an ashtray. I liked the way the tabletop echoed the black diamonds of her bikini and the chain-link fence, how the curve of her tumbler was the same as the curve of her raised thigh and the taller man's arm draped over the fence, and leaves on the banana tree at the Casados' house across the street.
If I didn't draw, what reason would there be for the way the light fell on the scallop of tiles on the Casados' roof, and the lumpy tufts of lawn, the delicate braids of green foxtails soon to go brown, and the way the sky seemed to squash everything flat to the earth like an enormous foot? I'd have to get pregnant, or drink, to blur it all out, except for myself very large in the foreground."