Artwork

My impulse to draw and paint originated from a desire to see—for the sake of writing. To better see a thing, to be pulled outside my mind. I thought that looking at a thing for a long time would whet my ability to notice everything. So much slips by. I’ll never forget my drive on city streets after I first learned how to discern negative shapes on paper. Everything between the cars, buildings, trees, and people popped, not unlike a hallucination. Even now, after I work on something abstract, the world leans in and withdraws, organizing differently. 

For a while, I sketched only when I traveled. It helped me stay in the moment, and it helped me remember how I felt when I was in a place. Working with paper, ink, charcoal, tools—this is gratifyingly tactile after endless contact with phones and computers. If I could publish a book in longhand, I would. (But who would read it?) I used to mediate. Following the lure of a line around an object is now my meditation. Any old object. Lots of coffee mugs across my pages. Hands, books, lamps, again and again. Sometimes an abstract image comes to me as I’m drifting off to sleep. This is a rare occurrence, and I wish it happened more often.

Falling asleep tonight, I’ll ask for a vision.

A writing teacher once said, It could have been skyscrapers that we were after, but we chose stories. I nodded in the moment, but now this feels too binary, too or when I mean and. Frank O’Hara wrote “Why I Am Not A Painter,” revealing how much like paintings his poems are. I’m in elite company, trying my hand at words and pictures. Elizabeth Bishop, Clarice Lispector, Sylvia Plath—and these are only a few writers, and only women—created two-dimensional art. 

Does the practice of drawing help my fiction? I don’t know. A story requires much more than the literal sense of seeing well. But considering geometry and balance, weaving horizontals and verticals, minding relationships between objects, and thinking in metaphor—these can be used to compose prose and poetry. As with a finished story, the process to get there always overtakes any initial idea. The visual art no longer serves only my writing—and yet, I can’t say it’s art for art’s sake. I’m at the mercy of mystery. Thank you for pausing to read, and look.