There is something interesting about how different art forms pour into each other.
Can we claim it’s an exchange of truth-telling?
Or maybe something more like a conversation possessed of a hunting for truth, wherein one art form pushes against another to open the seams apart of the small material world in which we’re all engulfed.
The writer Saul Bellow sees art as a giver of “hints” into “another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of.” In other words, without art, we’d never be able to receive the experience of knowing there is another frequency, another source for insight and knowing.
Writer Sheila Heti talks of the “breath of life” that art draws us into.
Visual art has an uncanny way of providing one solid way into “the breath of life” or “other reality.” In a painting, the entire message is given to the viewer in one go. In writing, instead, the message unfolds slowly and over time.
Maybe it’s for this reason that many writers find visual art so essential to their craft. There’s something different yet the same in the two art forms.
For writers, paintings help activate an imaginative vocabulary and landscape, they sharpen the senses and reveal a more nuanced and detailed way of seeing. And it’s offered at a different speed, a different level of intensity that must help the writer break free in those moments when they’re buried under the architecture of grammar, syntax and pacing.
Writer John Updike once said, “No better school exists [for the writer] than graphic representation, with its striving for vivacity, accuracy and economy.”
In my own writing practice, visual art has drawn out textures and preoccupations within my mind that are more hidden or elusive.
My first published work centred on the painting Bedroom Window by John Singer Sargent (below). I wrote then that it was the translucent curtains that twisted something inside and turned my mind toward a deep desire to not forget someone I’d lost at a young age. Maybe there’s something in the painting that stands out to you? Maybe it brings forward a memory or a desire?
As a wee side note that’s related, I wanted to share that last weekend, the Dormer Window Studio brought writing and visual art together in a plein-air workshop.
Brooklyn-based artist Seth Ruggles Hiler and I led a journey into a series of writing and drawing exercises that kind of amazed us all. It was our first workshop together, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out, but it happened—FLOW. Quite quickly we got to that sweet spot where the mind quiets and is directed into what is solid, real and loving you back for honouring it. And may I say, the gardens of Thorncliffe Park Urban Farmers provided the perfect backdrop. Its creative energy is special.
One day, we’ll do it again and I’ll make sure to invite you all.
Drawing is very intimidating to me, and yet Seth’s teachings didn’t allow my mind to get caught up in an idea of me and “drawing", instead it was about following a line, making your pencil into an ant that’s following the contours of a leaf or flower or piece of bark.
I’ll leave you with a Wendell Berry quote we all enjoyed at the workshop…..
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought