White Light

Just before her father's sudden death, Cuban-American artist Veronica Gonzalez is offered her first gallery exhibit, a real chance to break into the art world. Torn between the need to mourn and the pressure to create new artwork, Veronica is propell... Read more

Just before her father's sudden death, Cuban-American artist Veronica Gonzalez is offered her first gallery exhibit, a real chance to break into the art world. Torn between the need to mourn and the pressure to create new artwork, Veronica is propelled into a fever-dream of productivity and grief. With her love of art as her spiritual compass, Veronica finds solace in her mother and sister and also her protégé Leo, a young Dominican poet whose brother was killed in the 9/11 attacks in New York. At the same time, she finds herself growing more distant from the values of her Argentinian entrepreneur boyfriend. As she works on new paintings and installations, the creative process itself helps Veronica find the common thread in private grief and national tragedies. She also gains perspective on her relationship with her colorful but infuriating father, a volatile man of outsize appetites and passions who never stopped longing for his Cuban homeland. Veronica's art becomes a way to tell stories--those of her father, of Leo, of strangers in old photographs, and her own stories: her loyalties and resentments, her sense of unfulfilled spiritual longing, her capacity to be engulfed by the beauty of the nighttime ocean in Hawaii, stained-glass cathedral windows in Paris, a Zen rock garden in Kyoto. Praised by Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka for its "lyrical pace and texture," White Light maps a young woman's struggle to impose order on chaos, create something beautiful and lasting, and distill her grief, rage, and love onto the canvas. Less