Somewhere
in Monterey
Art and Imagination:
a way to write about what we see
This imaginative approach is well-accepted within the realm of modern writing. It is enjoyable and emotionally rewarding—try it and you will know.
When a painting captures our interest, we look in, calmly observing, pondering, curious. We wonder, and wondering, we search for answers, and soon enough the answers come—and soon thereafter the stories, and the poems.
Call it reverie, call us eccentric, but when a painting puts us into a dreamy state of mind, allow us the dream, and the words.
To be sure, a fine painting stands on its own. It doesn’t require a poem or a story. It needs no curator’s commentary, nor artist’s biography or speculation about his or her motivation. It needs no descriptive title on a card tacked on the wall beside it. It asks only that we take time to immerse ourselves in the emotions it engenders.
We offer our thoughts on this page only to suggest another way to look…and a way to write about what we see.
When we write about art we celebrate a practice dating back to classical antiquity. Ancient Greek writers strived to create poetic descriptions so elaborate that readers might visualize art they had not seen. The process, ekphrasis, is commonly defined as ‘a verbal or written description of a visual work of art.’
Modern writers have stretched this narrow definition and write not only about scenes they actually view on a canvas, but also about happenings in the darkest shadows and beyond the frame’s edge—things unseen, things conjured up by their imaginations:
“Were we to push our way through the tall grasses and approach the walls of the barn we would find there the heads of old nails embedded in dry cedar planks once painted red, but with no trace of paint remaining, the wood now several shades of weathered gray toned to a light blue by reflected moonlight. We would see black rust stains bleeding down from those nails, and from hinges and hasps.
“We need not go near to see these and countless other small details. We imagine their existence beyond our view, and that is satisfaction enough. For now we are content to stand outside looking in, our emotions feeling the pull of the fields and the distant hills and the cold scattered clouds and colder moon.”