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Katey Schultz, whom I met at the Interlochen Writers' Retreat in June, is currently teaching creative writing there to teenagers at the summer camp. She wrote on her blog 'The Writing Life' the other day about trying out the blind contour drawing/writing without rereading activity that Patty and I use in our Journal And Sketchbook class. It worked just as well for these young writers as it did for our older class. Here is one of the pages from her students' work that Katey posted on her blog: In this case, the student wrote on top of the blind contour drawing. Katey provides a good description of the entire process in her blog post:  The Writing Life: Where Lines Meet Words Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

'Love', Robert Indiana Throughout this series , I’ve been trying to think of artists who made serious attempts at writing , whether that be in poems or prose. There is of course a large number of visual artists who incorporate text as part of their visual work. To name just a few: Picasso and Braque. The Dadaists, such as John Heartfield. Rene Magritte. Antoni Tapies. Andy Warhol. John Baldessari. Ed Ruscha. Gilbert + George. Robert Indiana. Kara Walker. Richard Prince. Jenny Holzer. Broadly speaking, these artists use text in the following ways:  As part of a collage (think Picasso’s ‘Ma Jolie’) that plays with painted representations of things, plus snippets of actual things (e.g. newspapers) that traditionally do not belong inside the painted picture. The text is not usually intended to be read specifically for the meaning of the words themselves: they stand as a signifier of the world outside the picture frame, and thus serve the purpose of blurring the bou...

(l-r) Charles Baudelaire, Edouard Manet One of the most significant friendships between an artist and a writer was that between the painter Edouard Manet and the poet Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s-1860s. It was a friendship that didn’t only influence their respective views on art and its relation to society: some historians say it influenced the development of modernism as it emerged over the next forty years from the artistic movements of the late nineteenth century. Baudelaire and Manet met in 1858 at a restaurant in Paris which hosted regular lunches attended by artists, journalists, poets, and hangers on. After that, they saw each other almost daily until Baudelaire went to live in Belgium in 1864. Baudelaire was already known as a writer on art, and as the poet who had published ‘Les Fleurs du Mal ’ in 1857 – vilified at the time, just like many of Manet’s great paintings, but acknowledged by twentieth century poets such as T. S. Eliot as a significant milestone in nineteenth...

William Blake, Title page to 'Songs of Innocence' (1789) I talked in the previous post about writers who drew, or painted, and I suggested some reasons about why writers would deviate into visual art. What about artists who write? For some reason, there are comparatively few artists who turned to writing in the same way that writers turned to art. Maybe if you go back to Renaissance Italy, you find painters and sculptors who wrote poetry as part of their cultivation of a rounded personality. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo wrote sonnets that are still anthologized:  Michelangelo: Sonnet with marginal drawing Vasari, who wrote the unreliable but entertaining ‘Lives of the Artists’ was himself a painter. William Blake is perhaps the greatest example of an artist turned writer. He was apprenticed to a printer and ground out a living making reproduction prints for years, while writing poems in his notebooks. The version of ‘Songs of Innocence & Experience’ with his own h...

As I said in my first post on the subject, Patty and I started this class after seeing how certain artists and writers used another medium – a writer who drew, or an artist who wrote. There are some writers whose drawings and paintings are well known – the nineteenth century English writer of nonsense verse, Edward Lear; Winston Churchill; D. H. Lawrence. After doing further research, we turned up some names that really surprised us. A lot of authors from the nineteenth century left behind paintings and drawings in their notebooks and archives. Some of them, like a competent watercolour by Charlotte Bronte, probably came about because middle class women of the time were expected to be able to paint a little, play music a little, sew a little, instead of getting a formal education. Now that time has raised Bronte far beyond the intellectual level of her male peers, we can look at the painting not as a genteel diversion for a Sunday afternoon, but as a form of expression that was relat...