G2

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

I've just finished reading two novels about the artist Vermeer, The Girl with the Pearl Earring and The Girl in Hyacinth Blue. In the first Tracy Chevalier convincingly imagines the life of the girl in the painting of that name and concocts her relationship to the artist. Chevalier has obviously done her homework on the Holland of the time, on the little that is known of Vermeer's biography, and on his painting techniques. She manages to get all this in from the point of view of the girl, imagining how this lowly maid became not only Vermeer's model but his assistant, grinding colours, dusting the studio, even giving him critical advice.

The second novel is about an imaginary Vermeer painting, one that had been held privately so had never been cataloged or reproduced. The first chapter is about the current owner, and the next chapters are about the preceding six owners, back to Vermeer's time. Susan Vreeland has also done her homework on Vermeer's techniques, so well in fact that I wanted to be able to see an actual painting, not just a reproduction. I have seen at least one Vermeer, The Concert, in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, but I didn't observe it closely enough. Alas, I can never go back to see it because it was stolen in 1990.

I can certainly understand the temptation to write about an artist. Vermeer is a natural, with his enigmatic portraits, domestic scenes and a narrative all ready to go. But it's odd, isn't it, that a writer would want to see life second-hand, through the eyes of a painter. When I first started to write about artists in 1980, I got intrigued with their mode of being, and wrote a novel with a young artist as the central character. I based her teacher on David Silverberg, the engraver, the first artist I wrote about for ArtsAtlantic. Because I was so unsure of myself, I met with Silverberg twice, talked to him over the phone, studied his work, learned about engraving, talked to others more knowledgeable. I was completely enrobed in the engraving process, so no wonder I wanted to write a novel about it.

In an earlier column I mentioned the vigorous comic character, the artist Gully Jimson, and the next week Bruno Bobak mentioned him, too. Perhaps Bruno thinks that Joyce Cary had captured the way an artist feels and sees. It sure felt that way when I was reading the novel.

Painters make obvious to me images I haven't noticed, sometimes a broad geometrical sweep, sometimes a peculiar light, sometimes an intricate detail. Bobak painted my husband in profile. When I saw the painting, I thought, Bruno sure didn't get Bill right - his lower lip doesn't stick out like that. And then I looked over at my husband of many years, and my goodness, his lip did stick out like that. And what is more, I later looked at his aunt's lip in profile and hers did too! The poet Brian Bartlett has bought himself an excellent digital camera, and now he bombards me with stunning views showing details in nature that I would not notice even if I were in the same spot; I now see through a naturalist poet's eye.

About seven years ago the poet Joe Sherman conceived Writing on the Wall, a collaboration between a painter and a writer. He asked a poet to choose an art work at The Confederation Art Centre or The Beaverbrook Art Gallery and then write a poem about it. Lynn Davies chose a work by Sarah Maloney, who knit two arms and hands. Lynn determined that the arms were anatomically correct; she learned the names of the arm bones, giving her a vocabulary for the poem. She had never before known these terms, had not observed closely how the arm is structured: "The wrist bones,/ she knits these too, Carpals,/hinged to stop traffic or beckon/the prodigal kid back home." Lynn said that a German brain surgeon had purchased the anatomically correct brain that Maloney knit from pink string. From the NBCCD newsletter: "Harvard, Yale and Cornell medical schools now require all students to take compulsory art classes during their studies." The classes enhance their powers of observation.

Igor Dobrovolskiy is transforming Shakespeare's King Lear into a ballet. He was quoted in Salon, "We're not trying to do just a copy of his work. It's inspiration. It's the theatre interpreted in a different medium."

Transforming one work of art into another genre compels the interpreter to interact with it at a deeper level than he would ordinarily. Writing a novel about an artist gave me an objective correlative for the creative spirit, a way of expressing the impulse to make something new.

Nancy Bauer is an arts columnist who lives in Fredericton. She can be reached at wbauer@nbnet.nb.ca.