the american painter emma dial: a novel
Buy Cheap The American Painter Emma Dial: A Novel 
Buy Low Price From Here Now
âA racy, muscular, enlightening beauty of a novel.â âJames McManus
Emma Dial is a virtuoso painter who executes the works of Michael Freiburg, a preeminent figure in the New York art world. She has a sensuous and exacting hand, hips like a matador, and long neglected ambitions of her own. She spends her days completing a series of pictures for Freiburg’s spring exhibition and her nights drinking and dining with friends and luminaries. Into this landscape walks Philip Cleary, Emma’s longtime painting hero and a colleague and rival of her boss. Philip Cleary represents the ideal artistic existence, a respected painter, fearless and undeterred by fashion. He is unmatched by anyone from Emma’s generation. Except, just possibly, Emma herself. Emma Dial must choose between the security of being a studio assistant to a renowned painter and the unknown future as an artist in her own right.
Samantha Peale writes with astonishing insight about a young woman who risks everything to fulfill her ambitions as an artist.
……..
Readmore
Technical Details
– ISBN13: 9780393068207
– Condition: NEW
– Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
– Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
See more technical details 
2009-11-04
By Wanderer (Bend, OR & Greenville, SC)
It’s not much of a story. Here’s the plot: Emma Dial was a very promising art student who is growing old while making a good living as a studio assistant for a famous artist. The good living keeps her from making her own art. Her creative juice is nourishing her boss’ reputation, not her own. That’s about the sum total of the plot. What artist / writer / sculptor / playwrite do we know that’s not been in that situation?
This was a tough read because I wanted to just reach through the book, take Emma by the shoulders, and shake her initiative into action. I realized along the way that my own resolve needing a good shaking.
This book makes the reader see in themselves their wasted, suppressed, overwhelmed, underdeveloped creative lives and can maybe give a new spark to them. If you are a creative person whose creativity is mired in mundane tasks and economic practicalities, read this book! You will see yourself; you will examine yourself; your impatience with Emma may translate into action to meet your own creative needs.
2009-09-30
By A reader (Portland, Oregon)
A friend gave me this book with a knowing look: I am a woman artist who took many years to finally get down to work and make my art. I worked in galleries and for non profits and told myself I was being an adult, supporting myself, and that my art would someday follow. That someday somehow kept getting delayed until a major upheaval changed everything. So, I read The American Painter Emma Dial with a mixture of joy and uneasy recognition. Peale perfectly captures the way a young artist can get stuck–not just in a job, but also in a group of friends, friends who also aren’t moving ahead and who manage, in tiny almost invisible ways, to hold you back as well. Shifting one’s life and priorities so that creativity takes center stage is one of the most profound and elusive maneuvers an artist faces. But that is how a creative life becomes possible. It was a pleasure and a privilege to read Peale’s fictional account of a talented, cool, but not particularly self-aware woman wake up and accomplish the difficult and lifesaving move into mature, conscious art-making.
2009-07-30
By J. Hildreth (NY, NY)
I greatly enjoyed this novel, all fears it might be “chick lit shopping agonies” were erased quickly and I read this book on my breaks and commute to eagerly reach the ending in several days. The story is an interesting window into a contemporary NYC millionaire artistworld, and the power dynamics of celebrity and wealth relationships – or is Emma Dial simply serving a long apprenticeship and an adult’s uneasily discernable and seemingly contradictory path to find what she needs? The quality of Peale’s language is very admirable, a sparse style, some of the paragraphs read like prose poems in the most wonderful way, careful and playful word choice, but you don’t find long paragraphs describing what everyone looks like. And yet I feel like I knew these characters. Peale’s use of dialogue is advanced, people don’t waste time when talking-they’re elite and educated-they don’t have time to waste talking-and when they do engage in conversation, it is significant or disastrous. There’s also a very subtle humor throughout the tome: the whole idea of a painter paying someone else to paint his works, then people paying millions of dollars for the paintings amuses me to no end- as well as the idea of successful artists poaching each other’s assistants from each other . (Emma was certainly undercompensated, although impressively enough for someone her age in those days. ) But no one gets slaughtered in this book which is nice for a change from my usual fiction reading choices, and Emma is very sensitive, she drops out of life for 4 days after she smokes a little appropriated maryhuana. found myself back in a familiar NYC that interestingly isn’t pinpointed specifically timewise in the text – the `Bush is bombing again’ fleeting reference could have been any Bush – and I like this, it gives a sort of fuzziness to the city background. There are no freaking cell phones which I think is notable. I unhesitatingly recommend this book to all intelligent adult and other serious readers.
2009-07-06
By Devin Boyle (D.C.)
As someone who has spent their adult life studying art history and attempting, however unsuccessfully, to create my own work, I really enjoyed this book. I would recommend it to anyone who has even the faintest interest in art. It provides great insight into the mind of a struggling artist.
2009-06-20
By Eli Lederman (London, UK)
What a fabulous read! Samantha Peale writes with energy and zeal that evoke the visual sensuousness of the paintings her heroine executes, and the sheer drama of her soul-searching and ultimate self-discovery. Exhilarating passages emerge from stylistically stunning language, stacatto and fluid, like geat brushwork. This book is a work of great craft that captures in its subject the tumult of human creativity and talent. Along the way, it is pure fun, describing (painting?) scenes of artworld parties and bohemian lifestyles with such richness and revelation that the reader recalls the rooms. Thrilling. Could not put it down.
Images Product
Buy The American Painter Emma Dial: A Novel Now
Best Book 2009 
Leave a comment