I have been writing in one form or another since I was a child. And, as most kids, I've been drawing/painting my whole life. Both have come and gone as I’ve grown, but they’re always back there, in a corner of my mind. The child in me knows that the corner where writing and drawing reside is a park where I can always go to play. Sometimes I forget it’s there for months or years, but I always go back and find it eventually.
I began to take the visual arts more seriously in high school when I had a teacher who encouraged me and made me feel good about my work. This was a very new experience for me, and it changed my life quite a bit at the time. Art was something that I was good at, as it turned out, and I enjoyed exploring different mediums. Drawing, especially, takes me to another plane of consciousness. When I’m drawing, music is more exciting and food tastes better. Life in general is better when my pencil is dancing on the paper. Of course, I’ve studied color theory and painting as well, but drawing is a special experience for me.
Notebook, pen and drawing
I began looking into writing as a more serious endeavor a few years ago. I was in one of those jobs that suck the soul out of you. For my mental health I had to do something else and I had no idea what something else was. For years I had written in a blog where I would write for fun, and where I could recapture a writing skill that had atrophied. When I needed to break away from the soul-sucking job, I began to make a more concerted effort to write regularly, and to learn to do it better.
For me, writing and visual arts feed off of each other. Typically, in my blog, I learned to write posts around a photo or series of photos that I had taken. There are many ways of getting images and illustrations from the internet, but when I've tried to do that it always felt flat to me. When I use my own photos—though they may not be as professionally rendered as ones I could purchase—they are more ME.
Scene from a pocket cemetery in Kimbro Texas
I was walking around a small graveyard in Kimbro Texas one day and I saw a church a few miles away in the background. I was taking pictures of the gravestones, and I captured a few of the church as well, for the heck of it. That experience led to a post about the concept of needing a home, of having a home and about those of us who feel like leaves in the wind. The article revolves around the cemetery pictures, but the feature image is the church. I love that picture, with the clouds seeming to spin around the steeple. It is a Swedish Lutheran church in a town called New Sweden, inasmuch as there is a town called that. New Sweden is an unincorporated community with 60 residents, per Wikipedia, and it’s vaguely near Kimbro, another town that seems to be only a sign on the side of the rode. To me the church looks like it’s in the middle of nowhere, which is why I love it. Walking around the pocket cemetery that day made me a little melancholy, which is how that post came to be, and the church gave me a feeling of comfort and hope, which also found its way into the article. One friend, after reading it, asked if I needed a hug. (Of course I do. I always need a hug.)
I recently finished writing a novelette (Carmela’s Outside) about some of my cats. Writing it, and working on publishing it, inspired me to paint a picture of the main character, Carmela. It illustrates the story perfectly: a curmudgeonly cat on her sofa who learns to enjoy life again outside. And while painting makes me feel happy in its own right—I love the colors and the way it came out—knowing how it represents Carmela as she is in my book transcends the canvas for me. I didn’t set out to illustrate my story, per se. I wanted to paint a picture that captured the same feeling as the story, which came into being from watching my cats in candid moments.
What I love about this relationship between writing and visual art is that they are both in me. My love of photography, drawing and painting produces the pictures, and my writing captures feelings and situations. Both of those come from outside inspiration, but they are filtered in my mind and that is where they interact. I do write as a solo effort. Carmela’s Outside did not have any photos or drawings to inspire me, though several painting ideas did come out of it. And I do draw and paint alone, for the love of doing those activities. But when I find myself stuck with either writing or painting, I know I can lean on the other to get me going. Sometimes in the end, a story I write does not include the photo or picture I used for inspiration; sometimes it doesn’t even seem to be related to it. But in those cases, it was the picture that set the writing in motion. It works both ways, and the best part is that both of them came from me.
