Writing and Painting - Siblings or Strangers? (Part 3)

Left write, Right left?

When it comes to a child's education, literacy is and will be defined as the ability to write legibly and meaningfully to express thoughts. Art literacy is considered dispensable and looked upon more as a play than learning. But what if they learn more during playing than during learning, and to make the pitch irresistible, learning to paint actually can help learning to write. According to experts, Drawing and painting not only offer a child a way of expressing themselves creatively - they are also excellent activities for improving eye-hand co-ordination and the control of tools, primarily pen or pencil. This is a skill they will also need for writing. It is not only for students who have problem fitting in the established curriculum of schools which emphasize on writing, spelling and memorizing but not so much on thinking, creativity and originality but also for bettering students who are already doing well. In fact, it has been proven beyond doubt that there is a strong connection between thinking visually and solving problems creatively. World's greatest thinkers like Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill and William Butler Yeats have been known to be hopeless in school for being visual thinkers, weighed down by the structure of the educational system. It is not only about the right brain-left brain dichotomy of logic and creativity. It is also about the linear-non-linear dichotomy. Reading and writing are essentially linear and cumulative processes. A child learns to read from left to right or right to left, first a letter, then a word, then a sentence. On the contrary, painting is a non-linear and holistic activity. When a child starts painting, he or she thinks of the whole picture first and then continues to draw it part by part. A simple illustration of this is, when words in a paragraph are cut and scattered, a child treats it as a picture. The relative placement and pattern of the pieces are more important than the meanings of individual words. So these two part-to-whole and whole-to-part processes are perfectly complementary to each other when it comes to a child's learning. In short, when we give equal importance to painting and writing in a child's curriculum it greatly enhances his or her powers of expression. Equal 'aye' and 'nay' for writing and painting in this section.

The lovechild of word and image

Though we find writers and painters in a comic book syndicate constantly arguing, the words and pictures seem to be in perfect harmony with each other. Though we would like to think of comic books / cartoons / graphic novels very avant-garde and cutting edge; cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek friezes, medieval tapestries and illustrated manuscripts have long ago demonstrated the use of sequential images and words combined to convey a narrative. However, it needed the invention of modern printing techniques to allow the form to capture a wide audience and become a mass medium. Though we can go on and on about whether it is a low art or a high art and how the medium battles valiantly against the prejudice that images cheapen – or distract from – good writing and how images in books are supposedly either for children, the illiterate, or gimmicky add-ons, we would rather concentrate on the complex interplay of words and images in these books : the words don’t simply reinforce the pictures and the pictures don’t merely reflect the words – they combine to form a new language that requires reading of both word and image to make sense. Because the first rule in creating a narrative with words and images is, don't show what you are saying and don't say what you are showing. So instead of merely illustrating the text, the images say what the text leaves unsaid and the text, instead of captioning the images, add to it. And more often than not, they work perfectly well independent of each other. But what’s developing, is that graphic elements are used as literary devices – they are integrated into the text as part of the narrative, rather than as accompanying illustrations. The image is no longer merely illustrating, or reflecting the written text, but elaborating, interrupting and sometimes contradicting it. In books like Mark J Danielewski's House of Leaves and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, images increasingly become text and vice varsa. So a resounding 'aye' again for writing and painting getting along.

The Writer's Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers

 If you are still in the gray about the exact relationship between writing and painting, pick up this book. It will help you switch to some other wonderful shades of colour created by writers, bored with black and white. If you think pursuing two faculties of art will stretch anyone thin and there will be only a handful of these multi-talented genius, think again. This book showcases two hundred of them and mentions sixty-seven more in the addendum. Blake, Pushkin, Hugo, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Proust, and Kafka are just the tip of the iceberg. Every Nobel laureate in literature who has expressed himself in art is represented—from Yeats, Tagore, Kipling, Faulkner, Churchill, Shaw, Buck, and Elytis, to Hesse,Grass, Walcott, Fo, and Gao. And then there is more. But let's bypass the argument about whether everyone was worth being represented or whether they used to toss a coin the first thing in the morning to decide between picking up a brush or a pen. Instead let's go straight behind the scenes of their impressive double acts. As mentioned in an essay reprinted at the end of the book, not many centuries ago any educated person was expected to write and also to sketch and paint. Another piece reprinted here, make the point that the impulse to make marks on a surface is the same for writing, drawing, painting and sketching. Friedman unearths in most of his writers some physical or psychic injury, and sees their art as an attempt to overcome trauma, but that can equally be true about their writing. Maybe it was a change of scene which they were craving for through art. Or was there something deeper? We would never know for sure. But going through the quotes in the book about this dual life gives us fleeting glimpses of a fascinating machinery. Max Beerbohm thought of himself as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. George Sand did the ‘interior work’ of her writing while painting water-colours. Updike writes, a drawing can be perfect, while language is ‘intrinsically approximate’. Günter Grass says: "Look, says the image, at how few words I need. Listen, says the poem, to what you can read between the lines." And Herman Hesse says it all with, "Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones." Isn't that reason enough? Coming back to the original question we began with, I find we have a tie between the 'ayes and 'nays. Frankly speaking, I was afraid of just this kind of a limbo. So I leave the readers to fend for themselves. Who knows, maybe a wonderful graphic novel will come out of this conflict.

> Go back to Part 1 of the article

> Go back to Part 2 of the article.

Acknowledgments and Further reading:

• The Writer's Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers by Donald Friedman • Kurt Vonnegut discusses his art, as featured in The Writer's Brush • Matching words and pictures by Barnard, Duygulu, Forsyth, De Freitas, Blei & Jordan • ASCII Art • ASCII Animation • Try your hand at steganography • Calligraphy Gallery of John Stevens • Breathtaking Graffiti • House of Leaves by Mark J Danielewski • Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer • The Power of Pictures: Creating Pathways to Literacy Through Art by Beth Olshansky • Word & Image in Contemporary Fiction by Zoe Sadokierski