What's to be Done with Beauty

Creative Justice Press, 2012

Lois Parker Edstrom

What’s to be Done with Beauty focuses on museum pieces, those works of art we spend so many hours gazing upon, yet cannot place in our own lives. Lois Parker Edstrom does just that. She dives into the landscape of the art. She lets the paint transplant her; she discovers the children of the greats and reads their souls. From unhooking Frida to Edward Hopper’s women, to Maurice Prendergast’s Ladies with Parasols, to Mary Cassat’s Young Woman Sewing, we must consider the delicacy of women’s sanity in the midst of their everyday lives. Women are poised, posed, pried open like O’Keefe’s Green Apple on Black Plate. We find ourselves considering the “one sacrificial slice” with its “moon-white halves” primed for the “communion offered to those of us who wait.” It is the pulp of the fruit Lois is after—“when sleep does not come easy,” when “the woman could not be more beautiful” on A Gray Day. I am walking the white, silent rooms with her no longer aware of the security guard at every entrance.

Inspired by the vibrant body of paintings, the author brings to life characters as if they were composed of light rather than matter. What’s To be Done with Beauty is a well-crafted collection filled with "the anatomy of ripening [and] rhythm of growth." There is a constant movement of language that elevates the ordinary aside the sacred, "Marbles cradled in the hand scatter into a sheen of silence" and how "beauty... makes light into a whisper of blue shadows." With visual ingenuity, Edstrom creates a captivating collection that embodies beauty in lyrical language that makes a lasting impression.

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Contact Lois: lois@loisedstrom.com