The Writer's Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Writer's Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers Bonnie Costello The Writer's Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers. Donald Friedman. Minneapolis, MN: Mid-List Press, 2007. Pp. 457. $40.00 (cloth). Babble and Doodle. How readily the graphic gesture turns from script to sketch, as if drawing from an ink-well of creativity deeper than the divide of word and image. Cy Twombly's oceans of cursive, his graffiti canvases, explore this ambiguous dimension. Gao Xingjian's landscapes look like calligraphic marks swelling into mystical landscapes. One sees the contagion of word and image in the blottings of Victor Hugo, the marginalia of Marianne Moore, and the alphabets of Edward Gorey. The urge to create often hops medium and the writer becomes, for a time, a painter, sculptor, or collagist. Jean Cocteau's roving line in letters, notebooks, and sketches turns unpredictably verbal or visual: "Poets don't draw," he wrote in his album, Dessins (1923), "they unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently." Donald Friedman cites this and many other testimonies of writer-artists in his fascinating collection, The Writer's Brush, which draws together, in alphabetical order, over two centuries of visual art by poets, fiction writers, and essayists from around the world. Modernism was itself a period of the most fertile exchange between the arts, but it is less often realized how many writers of the modernist period (who represent over half of the collection) were themselves talented visual artists. The collection, supplemented by a traveling exhibition with additional works, offers instances of surprising secondary talent. More importantly, it opens a window onto the nature of creativity and the relationship between imagination and medium. The desire "to make you see," which Joseph Conrad famously affirmed as the impetus of writing, naturally pushes many authors toward a visual medium. Sketching was already part of the general education and leisure of the genteel and middle classes when Conrad made this assertion. The sheer draughtsmanship and mastery of visual media in evidence from such writers as John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Victor Hugo and Joseph Conrad, seems remarkable in part because general culture in our own time has abandoned this particular training, trading in the paint box for the digital camera. Yet our contemporary writers still practice the other arts, aiming to "make you [End Page 178] see" what they are feeling and thinking, whether the subject is personal or historical. For the writer distressed by the pale of words, art can seem more palpable, more intuitive, getting at aspects of consciousness that words dissipate. If the horrors of history have made poetry seem barbaric, the brush can seem to some a better tool for bearing witness. Peter Sacks, best known as a poet but now devoting most of his time to painting, has employed gestures of abstract expressionism toward a new historical realism. His aim is to open doors into the forms and struggles of his South African homeland. The mix of black, white, and red paint, of newsprint and rag and burn stains, of torn and sutured canvas, and of wire hatching, gives new import to the idea that the medium is the message. Many of the earlier, modernist artists represented here found themselves struggling between the poles of traditional training in realist expectations, and emerging forms of expressive freedom. Mina Loy studied art in London at the end of the nineteenth century, but found that young women were only encouraged to copy, and to produce sentimental watercolors for domestic amusement. In Munich and Paris she found more vital art scenes which allowed her to develop a distinctive, color-rich imagery of dream and desire underpinning the "paper house" of conventional morality. Where her writing is hard-edged, at once visceral and cerebral, and tense with lexical incongruities, the paintings tend to recall the transitional aesthetics and emotive power of art nouveau and Viennese secessionist work. In New York she associated with the dadaist and surrealist artists and began to work in mixed media, eventually creating relief sculptures from found materials which anticipate Jasper Johns and Robert...