Hungry for Light : The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher

"Ethel Schwabacher was fierce, uncompromising, tough-minded, and passionately devoted to her painting...Complex and fascinating are adjectives that barely do her justice.

She is also a wonderful writer who unflinchingly confronts her own work and probes for its sources" - Carolyn Kizer. "The 'hunger for light' in this journal is vivid, vital, compelling, and compulsive.

Ethel Schwabacher's confessions should be required reading for anyone interested not only in the psychology of the woman artist but, more generally, in the dynamics of creativity" - Sandra Gilbert. "The journal may well rank next to Virginia Woolf's in its masterful descriptions of the growth and education of a major twentieth-century female artist" - Jeffrey Berman. "There are few comparable efforts in the field of contemporary art.

I think of Louise Nevelson's "Dawns and Dusks"; Anne Truitt's books, perhaps" - Nann Gibson.

Artist Ethel Schwabacher, an Abstract Expressionist and member of the group exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery, kept journals from 1967 to 1980, the last thirteen years of her working life. Her art had spanned the great period of twentieth-century ferment, from Surrealism through Abstract Expressionism and into the brief flowering of women's figuration that coincided with the early years of the feminism of the seventies.

This journal takes the reader into the artist's mind when she was at the height of her powers.

She meditates on the sources of her own creativity; she observes the process of her own aging and her approaching death.

Comparable to such important literary journals as those of Virginia Woolf and Ana's Nin, Schwabache's record will become a valuable resource for research into the creative process as well as the art history and theory of our time.