Writers On Artists – Part One

 

I began my online writing journey in 2003, when I set up a weekly chat with a few writers I had met in a forum. One week I proposed we all wrote as a blind person without ever telling the reader the narrator couldn't see. This was one heck of a difficult exercise. Some of us attempted it, others didn't even go as far; the simple idea that we were to describe the invisible and the visible through the eyes of someone who had never seen gave us brain freeze. 

I was therefore thrilled when I opened a book that has been knocking about my bedroom for months, and found that its foreword, by A.S. Byatt, talks about words' inadequateness when describing visual art. Come back on Wednesday for some of my favourite extracts from Writers On Artists, a fabulous anthology, whether you are a writer, a painter, both or neither. 

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Writing about painting is peculiarly difficult. As Patrick Heron says "the flavour of words is intensely anti-visual. Strictly speaking, painting cannot be written about. Visual experience is purely visual..." A good novelist or poet, describing a place or person, knows that the words call up as may different mental images of that place or person as there are readers. Yet to write about painting requires unusual rigor and accuracy. A work of art is singular.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting. Most painters write badly, producing manifestos or vague lyrical afflatus. There is an "appreciative" language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words – "tender", "delicate", "intense", 'bold", and above all "vibrant." There is the language of the schools which "situates" works and artists in schools and movements and recently judges them with a remorseless innocent moralism on political, social, and sexual grounds. Many novelists and poets write badly because they see paintings as allegories of writing, and make a beeline for any included verbal clue, including the signature, as a way in to a possible narrative or meaning.

Modern Painters puts good writing first. The contributions in this anthology are written by novelists and poets who can see, and describe accurately what they see, by painters who can write, and can make non-painters understand how a painter thinks about his or her work, and by those very rare writers on art who can explain how and why a work of art is as it is and strikes us as it does. It isn't a text-book – the pieces are chosen primarily for the quality of the writing. And they have in common the virtues of toughness, flexibility, delight in impossible accuracy, writerly modesty – and above all, putting curiosity before the need to judge and generosity before smartness or position-taking. There is little gallery-gossip through what there is is amusing, a bearable amount of jokiness, and almost no dated meta-language. Each piece is a revelation, both of artist and writer – and in the cases of Hockney, Riley, and Heron, indirectly of the art of the writer, as well of the artist discussed.

And the illustrations are plentiful, splendid, and indispensible. They bear out Patrick Heron's point. They are "strictly unamenable to words of any kind... But we can hint with any luck at the patently real realities of the eye." These writers do that. It is truly a civilized collection. 

Comments

[Dirtywhitecandy]

What an interesting idea. We all have our ways of expressing ourselves. I've never felt the inclination to paint, preferring the visuals I get from words. Pictures are more vivid behind the blindfold, I guess.
Your post reminds me of a story by Jack Vance in which the inhabitants of a future Earth have an encyclopaedia of art. They don't have the pictures, just the descriptions. They try to recreate the artworks from the words, and never feel they are doing them justice. In fact, what they create far surpasses the originals.