I kind of write about visual art the way Roger Angell writes about baseball, which is to say, you're writing about life: it's a somewhat focused, limited terrain in which you write about everything.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them.
Writing is my job. I don't think of it as art.
It's been noted that writing about the production of art is a masquerade or metaphor for writing about writing. This may be true, there are similarities - both the verbal and the visual represent the thing or the concept.
I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art.
It's helpful for me to get ideas - the physical action of painting. Sometimes it frees up your writer brain. It's nice for me now that the writing has become a serious career that painting can become more like a hobby.
I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'
The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.
Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.
The more I see and know about life, the more ideas I have and the more I want to make art.
Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.