Portrait of a Landscape - Daniel D Watkins

This short adult novel could be about midlife crisis. It could be about art and creativity or about love, marriage, infidelity and divorce. But it's not. This is a novel about escape. Set between New York and the artists' colony of St. Ives in Cornwall, 'Portrait of a Landscape', presents two men: sculptor, Hugh Borne, and fine art photographer, Jack Rockshaw, whose creative, emotional and professional lives are in crisis. Hugh Borne has agreed to leave London to spend the winter with Jack Rockshaw's family in a desperate bid to find inspiration for a commissioned work and to distance himself from a recent divorce. Jack is in New York on a short term teaching contract where he has become helplessly captivated by the beautiful and gifted Amy Rosenberg, a psychology major at NYU. Hugh struggles to cope with the harsh Cornish winter and growing disillusionment and soon finds himself caught between Jack's affair and its impact on his friend's wife, Elise. Elise introduces Hugh to a talented, aspiring artist, Jonah. The sculptor agrees to take the boy under his wing but finds he has more to learn from this mysterious free spirit than he can teach. 'Portrait of a Landscape' explores, through its framed sections of narrative, how we are all trying, in one way or another, to escape from contemporary living. It seeks to uncover what it is we are hoping to find, how we might succeed and why we often fail. "I do everything to escape; I mean the things I want to do - the things you do so you don't spend life dying away the day. I fuck to escape, I drink, I wander, I gate crash your class, I wander some more only to get out." If you love art and if you love life then it's time to run away ...