Painter's Words, Writer's Brush

    
     For no particular reason, I decided that one had to choose between visual art and writing. At about age 13, I decided that I was an artist of the visual kind. The college preparatory curriculum in high school kept me from actually taking art classes, but my decision was made. In college, if I studied Art History, I was allowed to take studio art classes. As meagre as the offerings were, I had great teachers, like Concetta Scarvaglione for sculpture. The strangest part of this forced choice legend was the corollary that one could not make a living as a painter.
     Maybe these messages came from the choices of my father, whom I knew as a writer, and his brother, ostensibly a painter. Now I know better than to be so binary. First of all, my father pursued photography to augment his journalism. Secondly, my uncle worked as a screenwriter more successfully than he did as a painter. In fact, there's a wonderful book, The Writer's Brush, by Donald Friedman, that is an encyclopedia of writers who were quite competent as painters or sculptors. Just to mention a few, and only going from A to C, there's James Agee, whose brush and ink sketches have great line; there's Hans Christian Andersen's intricate cut-outs; there's Antonin Artaud doing very weird sketches; Ludwig Bemelmans gave us both the prose and the wondrously loose watercolor's of Madeline's Paris; Vassar's Elizabeth Bishop, painter and poet, who said "painting is more fun than writing." Please may we skip William Blake, as I grew up, as did my children, staring at a reproduction of one of his illustrations, hung over the dining table. And skipping right along to the family haunt of Sherman, Connecticut, the poet Hart Crane painted, something he only confessed to his Sherman neighbor, Peter Blume. I admit I am so un-with-it for assuming this visual - written dichotomy. Even as I write this, the daughter unit is taking a college course on the graphic novel, adding Daniel Clowes and Will Eisner to the list.
     The Chinese, of course, wouldn't admit to this dichotomy either. Learning Chinese characters requires mastery of the brush strokes that are used in painting, and the placement of a poem in a painting is part of the form. Good thing I can now take on the retirement from the world of Chinese scholars and paint AND write.
Top Left: Mistress of the Dance, Lucey Bowen, 1992