Excerpt from Playing Botticelli by Liza Nelson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

That's how I discovered my art. My boxes of wood-or clay or papier-mâché or whatever materials feel right-that I fill with my own constructions. My medium has become life enclosures. Not shrines. Not reliquaries. Though I like the spiritual nature of reliquaries, they're still about what is past and dead. My boxes are worlds unto themselves, filled with the shapes and colors and textures of my visions. Vision. Your vision forms your life. The seeing beyond takes you into the within and vice versa. As in waking dreams. As in visionary. My college roommate and ultimate mentor, Evangeline Pinkston, talked a lot about making her own inspiration, but Evie was a genius, a real genius. All I have is a strongly developed attentive unconscious. And thank the gods I have that.

I have always possessed the gift. My ability to lose myself, will myself lost within a given environment, has grown over the last ten years, but it has always been there inside, waiting for my recognition. I can do it anywhere, but out there on the Point is the best, at the tip of the peninsula, past the crumbling remains of the other bungalows. It takes some scrambling to get out there past the marsh, through the beach nettles, but once I make it to the thumbnail of limestone that sits like a turtle's back in the shallows, I'm home free. None of the noise of civilization to interfere with my inward hearing. Only the shushing of the tide, the shriek of the gulls, my own ragged breath. I become nebulae, like meditation without the mantra.

Even in this heat. Maybe the heat helps. Last Thursday was one of the hottest, muggiest days I can remember around here, and that's saying a lot. My toes squished deliciously deep into the wet muck of sand and dirt on what's left of the old road. The sand would have burned my soles but for the mud. My jeans and T-shirt stuck to my skin, so once I reached the Point I stripped them off, lay back, and opened my pores to melt into the natural sauna of salt spray, gray rock, and sky. I was transformed into leaf, cloud, foam, air. Bodiless, coming and going with the tides. My mother used to accuse me of daydreaming, but she had no idea.

So there I was peering into my own unconscious. A contradiction in terms, you might argue, but that is what happens. Like adjusting to the dark. Suddenly you see where everything fits despite, or even enhanced by, the blackness. Thursday, lying in that cocoon of heat, I traveled into a black room, windowless, doorless. I did not feel trapped. I felt the expansiveness of empty space. After a while, scissors cut slits in the walls and the walls curled like paper. Through the slits I saw blue sky filled with bleeding moons. Black to blue to red. Slices to circles to sharp moon points, silverfish bodies slithering, lines of unborn dead. And, strange or morbid as it may sound, a sense of profound peace.

I stayed there, inside wherever I was, for maybe an hour, maybe ten minutes, maybe only a few seconds. No matter. And then gradually it all faded back into the shimmer of sea and sky, the physical world I inhabit with everyone else. I could feel the physical reality of my body and the rock and the heat. I slipped off the turtle's back exhilarated by awareness that being alive was, is, the thing. Gray-green slime came off all over my arms and legs. Wet leaves and sand clung to my shoulder. Strings of seaweed wrapped around my ankle. They were life, life, life.

It is true that I am an unusually enthusiastic person.

I don't remember how I got back to the studio or sitting down to work. I was in a creative euphoria. But I do remember velvety browns and slippery blues and singing reds, a spiny silver. And the light. God, the light. Thick with heat. Tingly, stretching through the open double doors and along the walls, carrying me forward like a wave of energy as I sketched and cut and pieced.

Then the briefest shadow. I looked up. Dylan stood at the doorway beside a taller, dark-haired girl. Louise Culpepper's daughter, Cassie. For a fraction of a second, I thought they were another vision before I delineated the particulars of their presence. Identical black T-shirts and thigh-hugging skirts. Only, despite the multiple earrings and the painted eyebrows, Dylan, my Dylan, still chubby with baby fat, had not quite pulled off the look. She paled beside the other girl's theatrical, almost haggard disdain. Dylan's mouth and eyes formed small o's, the geometry of her horror quite wonderful from an artist's view.

From Play Botticelli, Liza Nelson. (c) December 1999, Liza Nelson used by permission.