Dear Reader,

I wrote Never a Cloud, 2022, through the lens of a landscape, inspired by an old house in Wales that wouldn’t be mine. Those things we know instinctively from another place and time. Then I wrote about art, and relationships, about love and betrayal. In 2000, I lived and worked in Rome. Each day when school let out, I drove my three kids to a crater lake in the caldera remains of a volcanic complex in the foothills south of Rome, where the Romans summered to escape the heat, on slopes of golden broom.

Two decades later, I randomly discovered the history of Lake Nemi, historically “Diana’s Mirror,” where Turner, master of light, painted The Golden Bough.

Never a Cloud’s George Lowell, (Margot Reid’s husband), director at the MET, was obsessed with Turner . . .  the mystery of a narrative.  

The tree or animal that houses an external soul, charred sticks and flowers, the Yule log, the sacred oak, the mistletoe, purple or golden hair . . .  numinous Scotland, the birthplace of paganism—this is the interior world of Never a Cloud.

As ever,
Jo