ABOUT THE BOOK
(from the back cover)

The search for truth and beauty draws a world-class artist to a haunted
island of young girls and dancing horses where he examine art’s “first
fire,” the magical inspiration behind all works of art and those who
make it.

The message is this: Art, whatever it is, however it evolves, has its
beginning in what artists call the first fire, that singular moment of
realization that the small sliver of life that suddenly presents itself
has the making of greatness about it. For that brief moment it’s lit
like a facetted gem. Call it inspiration, if you want, but don’t deny
its fire.

It can come as a bolt of lightning with the force of thunder behind it,
or it can slip up and whisper in your ear.

Firing the imagination is something children do best. They’ll connect to
the art and stories here as easily and unforgettably as they connect to
pretense in their own play. Children are master players on their own
stage. They are born to imagine, to suggest “what if” in the face of
“what is.”

It’s a short step from a glint of beauty in a faceted gem to the
netherworld where is drawn all the art, literature, theater, dance,
music and poetry in this world and those to come.

A remote and mystic island off the south coast of Korea is the setting
for this adventure. Three young models, fine actresses in their own
right, play at being themselves, but they wear dresses of old, giving
the play a dignity that alters them some. They draw into the game their
audience of one, an old artist. His years fall away as he relives the
child he once was and the child he once knew.

Inventive play alters the state of being and this can evoke art’s first
fire, the deep sense of “knowing” something beyond knowing. The glimpse
is fleeing. Frantically the artist searches for a way to save or capture
it before it’s lost: a pencil on paper, a stick on sand, a sharp rock on
a flat stone.

These are his tools and they will demand more from him than he now is
willing to give. But he will come to them when he needs them. He will
come to art’s history in the same way, when he must know what and who
came before him, and how they stood up against the storms that buffeted
them. But that will come also. It won’t matter to him how hard the
labor, how long the study. That will be the necessary part of the life
he’s chosen.

The awakening to art is the purest and most profound piece of the
creative puzzle. Without it there would be no art from Raphael,
Rembrandt, Renoir, Van Gogh. There would be no art all, no one to
appreciate it, to favor its beauty, truth and innocence over the many
ravages of our day.