Dad was a brilliant eclectic. Not only did his paintings comprise a fine and legitimate body of work, but he also built model railroads (he and a friend developed ON2 gauge and he served the Model Railroad Society as gauge specialist. Many will remember him as the author of countless articles for Model Railroader, Railroad Modeler, and The Narrow Gauge Gazette) and designed and built multi-hull sailboats (there his outlet was The Journal of the Amateur Yacht Research Society). I accompanied him on a great many of his sailing trips, on water spring through fall, and ice boating when the Hudson River froze over in winter, and rode narrow-gauge railroads with him on two continents.
Always on these outings, he carried that clipboard, and brought one along for me, too, and we sat drawing together, he sketching landscapes that would grow into paintings, and I dreaming on paper. I got pretty good at drawing. Very early in life I was anointed She Who Will Carry On the Tradition, and applied to art schools. I got into a very good one. And I did not go. Why? My grandmother’s sister was Constance Warren, who, as president of Sarah Lawrence College, built it from a two-year finishing school to the Seven Sisters wonderment it became. She took me aside one day and said, “Sarah, it’s all very nice that you wish to develop your artistic talent. But what will happen if you go all the way through your training and discover that you have nothing to say? Wouldn’t it be better if you first get a good liberal-arts education and then go to art school?”
I pounced on her idea. On the face of it, it was unassailable logic, but I will here admit that there was more to my decision than that: At eighteen, I was quite intimidated by the idea of being around nothing but really talented artists, and at the same time, felt oddly done with all that. I had put together a portfolio that was complete and accomplished enough to get me into art school, and that was indeed enough. I was ready to learn something else.
That something proved to be geology. I had shown a precocious knack for it in fifth grade, when my teacher, Miss Lucas, took us on field trips looking for minerals and had us draw—yes, draw; geology uses the same parts of the brain as art—folds and faults and the innards of volcanoes. My uncle Jack Ferry took me “rock hounding” as well, scrambling over the mine dumps that dotted Maine’s pegmatitic granites. And I had gone looking for big micas with Dad, which he used, peeled into thin sheets, as the glazing in the windows of the parlor cars on his model railroads. But when I got to Colorado College—that good liberal arts joint that had a late enough admissions application deadline to serve as a good landing spot after Great-aunt Con nudged me off my original path—I still thought that “girls” could not study science (yeah, 1969 was back in the Pleistocene, and there were woolly mammoths eating daisies in front of my dormitory). I had to take a couple of science courses to qualify for that liberal arts B.A., so I signed up for geology that first term to get it out of my way, and … that was my only A that semester. The rest is history.
I have now also earned an M.S. and have enjoyed three decades working in the rock trades. Where did the writing come from? Well … as a product of that “good liberal arts education,” I see no real boundaries between the disciplines, and so found no reason not to start writing mystery novels about geology when the creative itch struck for about the fifth time. I must credit my father (in his eclectic brilliance also a storyteller of the first water) and my great-aunt’s master plan, not to mention my mother, Mary Fisher Andrews, who read aloud to me, and, as my sixth-grade English teacher, taught me the structure of language with all the trimmings (essay writing, sentence diagramming, and Gawain and the Green Knight), and her father (Stephen Joseph Herben, Professor of English Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College). All of these fine family teachers taught me one lesson above all: There are no boundaries or limits to what I could do. That bit about girls and science must have come from someone else.
This is the ninth Em Hansen forensic geology mystery novel. So, why did I write about art? The obvious reason is as a salute to a family tradition. It was darned lucky for me that they were there, because I am dyslexic, and in a great many other families I would have been labeled stupid. In mine, I was called various other things (underachiever, ornery … ) but never stupid. Dad, Granny, and Aunt Con were always there beaming their approval and interest in everything I did, and Mother always expected me to dive headfirst into whatever career engaged my mind.
Geology has certainly done that: It is in fact an intellectual playground for me. I was born with the talent for four-dimensional thinking (a geologist thinks in the three dimensions of space and projects it forwards and backwards through time. My dyslexia, or trouble decoding linear/sequential text, is on the flip side of being able to take in discontinuous—often ambiguous—data in random order and build space-time models from it. Not a bad trade, if you ask me).
But I found other reasons to write about art. First, art and science are, to me, parts of a whole, and I prefer my universe as fully integrated as I can make it. Second, all the while I was whacking rocks with a hammer, the love of art for art’s sake was in my heart. And third, deep down inside I was a chicken. That other reason for not going to art school really had to do, among other things, with color: I could not handle it. I could draw, but I could not paint. Not really. Not like my dad and grandmother could. Yes, they studied with the masters to develop their skills, and if I had gone to art school I might have gotten there, too. But I did not, and it has always bugged me. So a couple of years ago—yeah, after Dad died and was no longer there to notice if I did it badly—I took up drawing with pastels, kind of a hybrid between drawing and painting. And I noticed that I was holding geology in my hands, all ground up and compressed into sticks that I could rub onto a piece of paper to create art.
With love,
Sarah Andrews, still a student
www.sarahandrews.net
November 11, 2003
EARTH COLORS. Copyright
© 2004 by Sarah Andrews Brown.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
eISBN 9781466818071
First eBook Edition : April 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Andrews, Sarah.
Earth colors / Sarah Andrews.—1st St. Martin’s Minotaur ed. p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-30197-9 EAN 978-0312-30197-2
1. Hansen, Em (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Remington, Frederic, 1861–1909—Appreciation—Fiction. 3. Painting—Forgeries—Fiction. 4. Forensic geology—Fiction. 5. Women geologists—Fiction. 6. West (U. S.)—Fiction.
7. Poisoning—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3551.N4526E26 2004
813’.54—dc22
2003058683
First Edition: April 2004
Earth Colors Page 34
