Ekphrastic Conversations
Visual artists nourish my imagination and my writing work. I see them as important companions to helping me understand myself as a writer and to be faithful to that task.
I came to see and better understand this dynamic when, years ago, I was invited to participate in an art residency in Berlin at the Green Hill Gallery in Berlin. (Check them out, artists!) As a poet, I felt a bit like an interloper among the other artists. Sure, I enjoy playing with visual materials like a child might -- I like to watercolor from time or time, or sketch something in a journal -- but it took me some time to realize that I was an artist of a kind, and that I had tools, just like the painters, calligraphers, photographers, and sculptors did. My work was writing poetry, and tools were words and the materials of words: pens, paper, letters, etymological dictionaries, books, poetry, essays, speech, tone, an observant mind, etc.
So I didn't "feel" like an artist among the visual artists, but I recognized that the habits and patterns of creative work were quite similar. I felt freedom around and with visual artists because I wasn't competing with them. I didn't feel any prick of envy or shame among them because we were doing different things, being different kinds of creative workers, and keeping our minds to our work -- not to the toys and trinkets of success or praise -- was the path of freedom. A valuable correspondence began between and among us during that residency. As I watched portrait artists paint, as I watched a photographer at work, I played with words in my mind. What word captures this moment, this work, this worker well?
I have long appreciated the "ekphrastic" task, for that is what I doing. Ekphrastic poetry is poetry written from meditating on art. The textbook example is Keats' "Ode to Grecian Urn." Whether a poem is drawn from specific pieces of art, or from the contours of lived experience, poetry converses with what is, what should be, what might be. Poetry may also seek to wrestle beauty out of beauty, or beauty out of great ugliness, or as Madeleine L'Engle puts it so well, to wrestle "cosmos out of chaos," to discern lines of truth among the world's noisy, dominating lies.
I also appreciate "ekphrastic conversations" with artists themselves. Yes, I enjoy taking in museums and seeing paintings, drawings, statues, or murals, but I find that I am particularly helped by witnessing artists at work, or hearing them reflect about their work, or actively seek to see and understand better what they have done and how they go about it. The difference between "going to a museum" and "witnessing an artist at work" is vast; it is the difference between passive consumption and active, reflective, dynamic learning. Without intention, we are all prone to slipping into passive consumption as we go through a museum. But if we can stay in an active mode, we can deepen our conversation with art, bringing our own wonder and curiosity and sense of discovery and openness to learning to it. All of this can nourish writing.
One of my favorite living artists to watch work is my second-born, our middle-child, Hannah. When Hannah gets to work -- by which I also mean, when she is deeply "at play" -- Hannah is at her desk, deeply focused, risking things, making attempts with paper, knives, all kinds of glue, paint, and pencils. She builds and constructs. She discovers things as she goes. She tries stuff. She puts things together and sometimes tears other things apart. She paints over stuff, or glues this and that. She is gusty and careful all at once. Mostly, she is focused, giving her attention to a process that I look at as utterly mysterious and completely fascinating.
When she has worked, when she has played, she emerges from that time of focus truly energized. You can almost feel that she has been sorted out within herself for having wrestled with materials at her desk. She is often, but not always, satisfied with her results, but she almost always has a sense of satisfied settledness within herself for having played and worked as an artist. It is as true for children as it is for adults: We long to work at things that demand our best efforts, that tax us and call forth our skills and creativity, our immersive focus, our capacity for great risk and problem-solving. Even though we tire, the action of taking action, the work of work, is profoundly energizing and equips us for future work. The struggle serves us.
As a writer, I feel terrible when I haven't written. It's not like "feeling bad because I haven't done a homework assignment," the exhaustion of procrastination. It's deeper than that, and it's definitely not the same "terrible" as "doing something wrong." It's closer to that numbed and restless sensation from being a bit too inert -- physically, mentally, or emotionally. As a writer, I just feel so much better after having written, even if the writing itself will never be read by another human soul.
An artist acquaintance of mine -- I really should call her a friend because we have met in person many years ago, and we have a lot of mutual friends between us -- recently shared a commissioned piece of art she had finished for a client on Instagram. It's a stunner, and immediately grabbed me. The artist, Christen Yates, shared this reflection along with the image:
"Another diptych commission framed and ready to head to its [new] home. For this one, I was given the size, 24 x 50 inches, the color palette, and the need to have a barn in it somewhere. Fun challenges I never would have done on my own."
This reflection was so valuable to read, giving me important facts that helped me get playing. As a writer, I started conversing with it by asking questions: What is it about diptychs and triptychs that is so compelling? Why do we feel drawn to organizing images in panels like that? Why do I find the asymmetry of this diptych so fascinating? Look at how that barn is stretched and broken across the panels! Wow! What in the world would I do if someone asked me to write an essay, or short story, or poem and "put a barn in it?" How does one write "barn" across asymmetrical stanzas? Or to have a word count in the form of inches? Journalists do that! Look at what she did with those instructions! Why do I find these colors so attractive? I've always loved winter scenes, how spare they are, how bristling with life and death and potentiality. There's an interesting parallel in color palette between cold winter scenes and hot desert ones -- ?
The words that flow! Already, in the conversation, I'm beginning to dig up the clay of words just by ekphrastically conversing with this painting, seeking to find transpositions to poetry and philosophy, wrestling with the meanings. The image, coupled with the insights of the artist, her embrace of exacting constraints like palette, object, panels, and inches, helps me ask questions, questions that help me to know myself better, and to explore other selves better too. The clay-words that I'm digging up, seemingly out of nothing, the raw draft material, may eventually get shaped into a pottery-like written reflection. An essay. A meditation. A letter to a friend. Or, perhaps, a newsletter update like this one.
Even more, I'm turning around in my mind the value of Christen's faithful taking up her brush, facing a blank canvas, accepting a constraining challenge. Her moral courage in this task, this living work, paired with her faithfulness to that task, calls me up and out to my own, to embracing the risks that are mine, and to getting down to serving the work itself. I am challenged to work and play -- for, ideally, they are the same thing! -- with words and their precious meaning.
Christen isn't the only artist who feeds me. There are so many others, enough to fill the pages of book. I "collect" artists I respect and who nourish me like flowers in a bouquet, like saints in a hagiography. It's a shame that hagiography has such a bad connotation as a word, as false life-writing, as writing that obscures rather than illumines. (Indeed, we need to be on guard against kitsch; I've learned from another artist-friend, Michelle Berg Radford, about the tempting dangers of kitsch.) We need saints among us who write their lives faithfully, truthfully, and courageously, taking up adventures in wholeness and humanity. And that is actually how I see good artists: as saints whose lives nourish me to live my life better, to write a more truthful word, even if it may be a hard word, and to see the constraints of my actual lived existence as the place where the great mysteries dwell.