SMALL WONDER

Painter, Installation Artist, Writer, Andrea Scrima has written a work of fiction. Dreamlike Marquezian sequences float and weave through the eyes of a woman in the wake of her father’s death, the shadow of her mother’s passing. Between Brooklyn, the Village, the LES, two sides of Berlin the narrator navigates her path in paint, filtering life toward some sort of clarity, forging away from confusion. “How many times has my thinking become caught in a loop: how many times has my mind circled around a certain word, an expression that passed over a face and vanished, around and around, trying to get closer but to what. That feeling of something being there, circling around and around...”

A narrative kept closer than a secret, oozing in slow, soft, whispers reminds us what it is to feel loss, to live life. To face change. “I close my eyes and imagine what it would be like to have lost you.”

Sequential shorts shift in point of view from first to third, from I to you. The narrator works. We are given glimpses into her studio. Ms. Scrima honors us with a glimmer of what may be her most intimate environment. We begin and are carried throughout the work, toward the ethereal reality in her paintings, her studio, her sanctum:

The moths that began nesting in the orange peels in the studio; how I didn’t notice it at first...we moved one year and a few of the studio boxes were relocated to the new apartment, and now after how many generations, a thin yellow worm occasionally crawls up the wall and I gaze at it in alarm, astonished at this tenacity, this will to live.

The work is a delicate, yet naked and unapologetic, and our collective conscious is greater for Spuyten Duyvil press publishing this small, wondrous book.