imagination is the star

"it goes on endlessly and one never gets to the place where the sun is setting but the red gets more and more intense"    Tove Jansson

This post is about a book.
Sculptor's Daughter (by Tove Jensson)
is written from a child's point of view. 
Child logic combines with adult wisdom and experience
and teaches the reader about art.

In fact, the book is a work of art.
It is a work about imagination.

"making a whole is very important.  Some people just paint things and forget the whole"
Tove Jansson

'The act of art becomes charged with power, then with failure.
We are up against mis-judgements, pre-conceptions, mis-interpretations, age-old entrenched beliefs, traditions, authorities, inevitable failures and competitions, and those games you have to play.' *

'A child, she reminds us, is refreshingly free from pre-conception - as well as a sponge for it.' *

We see the closedness of pre-conception and the child 's unknowing up against it. *

Sculptor's Daughter is full of images.

Darkness and light,
kindness and understanding,
objects and humans and emotions vivid and surreal.

The book makes us understand the importance and the fragility of our smallness.

It asks us to be alive to the imagination.

 It is full of flung-open windows.
Thrown-open doors. *

Tove Jansson has written a book that salvages and gives back to adults the child-sized truth about how things connect and how they mend.

How they continue.

I dream and my soul awakens.
Imagination is the star.    Carl Jung

The italics marked with * are by Ali Smith, and are taken from her introduction to Tove Jansson's memoir, Sculptor's Daughter.  I read it over Christmas when the children were home with their magical world.

The images are of some pieces I made in December while being a grandma and a hostess and a mother and I wasn't letting myself think too much.