With Brush and Pen, Readings and Conversation with Anita Rau Badami, Lorna Goodison, and Diane Schoemperlen: A Mutually Reinforcing Cycle

My whole life I've been interested in connecting things that don't appear to belong together. I wanted to create something out of the details and objects jostling around in my mind, to ring words out of my visually intense environment. Visual art always seemed the natural response when I strained at articulation. I was introduced to collage early on in elementary school and was compelled to arrange images to convey my desired meaning. Eventually I began oscillating between image and text, prompting an interest in how the visual and verbal function together.

Reading through The Kingston WritersFest program a few weeks before the festival, I came upon With Brush and Pen, Readings and Conversations with Lorna Goodison, Anita Rau Badami, and Diane Schoemperlen, all writers who have a parallel practice as visual artists. I can't describe how excited I was to be in attendance at this event.

All of the writers agreed there's something visually present in all language, a feeling under words. Anita suggested that “ all writing should be painterly,” and that there is a, “mutually beneficial dialogue between literature and painting.” It is interesting to observe how each writer came to this dialogue between image and text: Anita recently returned to school to study fine arts, while Lorna Goodison started out as a visual artist and studied in New York at the Art Students League, and Diane Schoemperlen is self taught and has been making collages for many years. Their different approaches at different times seems to be evidence for the flexibility of experience and creation. These writers have taken up the invisible dialogue between the visual and verbal, and incorporated it into their work. It is a process of capturing, internalizing and expressing.

A member of the audience asked, “ what do you want people to look at first, the illustration or the text?” Each writer agreed it doesn't matter. It is not the approach that matters but the affect. I'd further this by acknowledging that one art does not consume the other— it is a movement. The Roman poet Horace wrote in his Ars Poetica (13 B.C) the dictum “Ut pictura poesis”— “as is painting, so is poetry.” I think he is describing the movement of artistic composition, the performance of singular parts acting as a whole in the absence of a frame. The edges may not align exactly, but we can scissor them to meet in ways that expand our understanding of creation.