Comments on: The Art of Looking Back

By: Hazel Boydell

Hazel Boydell — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:18:37 +0000

“The pacing is as deliberate as a brush stroke, and Kishkan’s unflinching, vividly rendered reflections offer a powerful study of how art can both celebrate and appropriate the female form. A richly textured meditation on a reclamation of self from the frames of the past.”—Kirkus

By: Hazel Boydell

Hazel Boydell — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:28:42 +0000

“Theresa Kishkan writes beautifully about art and selfhood, about the timorous spirit of young women during an era that was repressive of their sexuality even while it held them accountable for men's desires and actions. For British Columbia readers, this is also a fascinating portrait of Victoria during the era of the significant Limners Society, a group of artists and writers that included (as well as Kishkan's portraitist), crucial figures like Myfanwy Pavelic and poet-critic Robin Skelton.”—Heidi Tiedemann Darroch, Canadian Women’s Crime Fiction

By: Hazel Boydell

Hazel Boydell — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:44:44 +0000

“An honest tender reflection on a version of a younger self, mediated through the male gaze, and all of the complexities of emotion, power and social dynamics that come with a relationship that lives in a ‘grey area.’ The prose is a stunning landscape of memory, archive and art that reads like a confessional. This haunting story of subversive beauty is not to be missed.”—Sonja Pinto, BC Bookworld

By: Hazel Boydell

Hazel Boydell — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:06:42 +0000

“Kishkan is a lid lifter, bearer of ceilings, and stair dweller who scatters thoughts and emotions with keen insight, Homeric hymns, and the Limners of Victoria’s artistic scene. Her portrait with dark hair, strewn flowers, blue vest, and lateral gaze haunts the pages of her memoir. Her story involves an understanding of boundaries, not just between men and women, but between art and society, and the nature of frames and framing. … Kishkan’s flowing words, thoughts, and rhythms overpaint Wilkinson’s portraits in a pentimento of counter-discourse that purges shame and guilt.”—Michael Greenstein, The Seaboard Review of Books

By: Hazel Boydell

Hazel Boydell — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 21:00:12 +0000

“The Art of Looking Back is a necessary, nuanced book for these polarized times. Oh, I understood this memoir with every molecule of my body—as will any older woman who was once a young woman spinning within an older man's obsessive attentions. I devoured this unsettling book. Kishkan's delicate, luminous style explores power and inadequacy, beauty and culpability with poetic attention.”—Evelyn Lau, author of Runaway and other titles

By: Hazel Boydell

Hazel Boydell — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 19:59:54 +0000

“The Art of Looking Back is a powerful, heartwrenching examination of discovering the complexity of power imbalances, sometimes long after the fact. An artist’s muse steps out from the frame that the artist created for her and into her own agency in this beautiful memoir exploring the ripple effects of the male gaze in the world of art.”—Kitty Stryker, author and consent educator

By: Hazel Boydell

Hazel Boydell — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:39:12 +0000

“Theresa Kishkan’s The Art of Looking Back excavates art, memory, and the boundaries we cross—willingly or not. She recalls her late-1970s style—a faded jean jacket, flowers in her hair, a green hat, or was it red?—while confronting the lingering discomfort of being painted nude without consent by an older, married artist, Jack. She also encounters his even more unsettling depiction of his pre-adolescent daughter—a painting she later purchased and brought home. Each glance revives unease: why did she make it her own? Writing back to histories of domination, Kishkan joins muses and models like Fernande Olivier and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, reclaiming the gaze. Unflinching and vividly rendered, this memoir probes complicity and betrayal, showing art’s power to bear witness—and to expose the perpetrator—decades later.”—Irene Gammel, director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University

By: Hazel Boydell

Hazel Boydell — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 19:01:39 +0000

“Nuanced and poetic, The Art of Looking Back details the evolving understanding of a mature woman looking at the tapestry of feelings and experiences from her younger years, especially triggered by memories of a well-known older man’s obsessive enchantment with her as a flowering young woman through to her middle years.

Filled with rich reminiscences from earlier years and critical questions posed as an older woman, Theresa Kishkan’s poetic and vibrant writing grapples with youth’s evolving self-image, the reactions and decisions creating life’s trail, and the questions and insight that age can bestow.”—Christina Johnson-Dean, writer, teacher, and art historian

By: Hazel Boydell

Hazel Boydell — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:38:32 +0000

“Theresa Kishkan travels an odyssey of her own memories and a lifetime of reflections to recover her younger self from an avaricious, obsessive older man and a society all too eager to judge or look away. By translating the passage of time and knowledge earned along the way into new memories, Kishkan brings the reader on her quest for reclamation. Have our cultural times changed enough to meet the author’s gaze?”—India Rael Young, curator of art and photography at the Royal British Columbia Museum

By: Hazel Boydell

Hazel Boydell — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 17:33:15 +0000

“This ground-breaking book examines concepts of shame and complicity and obsession and so it is, by turns, disturbing, heart-breaking, and infuriating. But most of all it is relentlessly honest and beautifully written.”—Caroline Woodward, author of Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper and other titles