Color, space, and creativity: art and ontology in five British writers

Abstract

This study of color, space, and creativity focuses on texts by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell, and A. S. Byatt. author examines Woolf's structural use of color in To the Lighthouse and Lawrence's colorful visualizing of place in Sea and Sardinia and the Letters. Lawrence interprets the creative process in Apocalypse, tracing spiral rhythms that culminate in vision, while Cary, in The Horse's Mouth, dramatizes an artist's vision of 'the world of colour'. Durrell expands the power of color through metaphor in his islandscapes and in The Alexandria Quartet distills the city's ethos in a 'cyclorama' that fuses sensations and memories.The final four chapters focus on Byatt's novels, starting with the creative-critical dialectic of The Shadows of the Sun and hyper-intense perception in The Virgin in the Garden. Painting comes to full bloom in Still Life, where Van Gogh's study of a breakfast table inspires a surrogate writer to compare words and paint. In The Matisse Stories Byatt improvises on the artist's color combinations and compositional philosophy. Highlighting interactions of color, space, and creativity that take on ontological dimensions, Stewart's study will lead to ongoing reflections on the roles of color and space in modernist texts. Jack Stewart is Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia.