Inspired by art

On Saturday 22 June, I taught my first ekphrastic writing workshop at the HOTA art gallery on the Gold Coast. It felt like a full circle moment, a coming home to a small extent. Nearly 30 years ago, I was a volunteer in the then Gold Coast Arts Centre Gallery while I was studying Art History. As a young woman, I knew I wanted my future and career to focus on art, but to be honest, I was a bit lost. I’d studied teaching but didn’t enjoy working in a school environment. I loved painting but was mostly self-taught, so didn’t feel I had the skills to pursue a career as an artist.

All I knew for certain was that I was far happier surrounded by beauty and paintings and sculptures and people who love those objects as well. This is still true.

Friends have been encouraging me to combine my love of art with writing and teaching for years and I’ve finally found the perfect vehicle for it. I never wanted to teaching painting, for example. I don’t feel I have the requisite skills. But encouraging writers to create works inspired by favourite artworks, also known as ekphrastic writing, is right up my street!

In ancient Greece, ekphrasis was the skill of describing an artefact in vivid detail. Until photography and inexpensive reproductions existed, the ability to vividly describe an object of great beauty or significance was a highly prized skill. One famous example is in The Iliad, when the narrator describes the Shield of Achilles in fine detail. The description leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind about just how amazing the shield was. In 1810, sculptor John Flaxman was commissioned to create a replica of the shield, which he could do in incredible detail because of the exquisite description.

More modern examples include movies and novels set in the art world like The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone. I could toss my books in here too, with Hotel Deja Vu featuring an artist who travels back in time and the character Camryn in Alia Henry and the Ghost Writer.

We started the workshop with a very tiny bit of Slow Contemplation of a projected artwork, Hinterland by Veda Arrowsmith. Slow contemplation was developed by Jennifer Roberts from Harvard Art Museum. She encourages her students and other visitors to observe an artwork for 3 hours (s! 3 hours!) then write about it. We only had a 90 minute workshop so after a warm up exercise of ten minutes, we did some writing then headed up to the new exhibition to contemplate the artwork for longer periods than we normally would when visiting an art museum.

As usual, I encouraged the participants to write without editing and made it very clear we would not be sharing our work! Reading your work aloud for total strangers isn’t fun. I don’t think I was imagining the look of relief on most of the faces. For many people, it takes courage to attend a creative workshop.

Last year I attended a similar workshop and at the end of our session the facilitator asked us all to go around the table and share our work. The first three read theirs out. People nodded and sat quietly, listening politely. Then the fourth person read their piece out. Holy crap, it was good. The group erupted into spontaneous applause. Then naturally, we felt obliged to applaud for the rest of the readers regardless off the quality of the work. I mean, mine wasn’t great but it got a polite applause. Those first three readers must have felt like crap. I never want to make anyone feel that way.

I then re/introduced the ELEMENTS AND PRINCIPLES OF ART. Anyone who has done high school art will remember these. I used to hate doing this basic exercise every year on the first class of term. Back then I thought it was a cop-out lesson for slack teachers, but as artists or those writing about art, we need to understand the elements and principles to have access to the language of art.

Elements of Art
colour	made up of three properties: hue, value, and intensity. • Hue: name of colour • Value: hue’s lightness and darkness • Intensity: quality of brightness and purity
form	three-dimensional and encloses volume; includes height, width and depth (as in a cube, a sphere, a pyramid, or a cylinder) Form may also be free flowing
line	a point moving in space. Line may be two-or three-dimensional, descriptive, implied, or abstract
shape	two-dimensional, flat, or limited to height and width
space	Use of positive and negative areas to create a sense of depth or tension
texture	the way things feel or look as if they might feel if touched
value	The lightness or darkness of tones or colours. White is the lightest value; black is the darkest. The value halfway between these extremes is called middle grey

Principles of Art
emphasis	combining elements to highlight the differences between those elements
balance	using elements to create a feeling of equilibrium or stability to a work of art e.g. symmetrical or asymmetrical
contrast	combining elements by using a series of changes in those elements and how they stand out from each other in a work
unity	how well elements of an artwork gel or work together
harmony	arrangement of elements to give the viewer the feeling that all the parts of the piece form a coherent whole
pattern	the relationship of certain elements to the whole and to each other, e.g repetition
rhythm	Movement created by repeated elements to signify a visual tempo or beat
variety	using different shapes, sizes, and/or colours in a work of art
scale	the relationship between objects, e.g. size, number, shape, etc and including the relation between parts of a hole.

Then I introduced three basic approaches for writing inspired by artwork. I encouraged the participants to come up with their own ideas, and feel free to explore them.

The first is a description of the artwork in the style of ekphrasis. Exploring the subject matter and the elements and principles employed by the artist. We can talk about the quality of the lines, the colours used, the contrast, size and materials that go into the work. The landscapes in the current exhibition have similarities and differences in the colours and textures, size, construction, etc.

The second option is to write about how the work makes you feel. Describe the emotions or thoughts stirred by the work. The powerful colour in the Hockney evokes high summer in the Grand Canyon while the Von Guerard, and the Imants Tiller piece inspired by it, feel like sunrise in spring. Both may inspire a sense looming over the landscape, vertigo even.

A third option is to write a story inspired by the work. The story may not even mention the work. It may be inspired by a memory or a total fantasy.

When writing the feeling of an artwork you have to allow time to really observe the work for a good period of time and then write. The writing is almost secondary in importance. You can’t listen to your inner critic. Just let your hand move over the paper and write how you feel. Notice what you always notice first. What can you see if you sit and ponder the work for a long period of time?

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I’ll be using my own methods to enter the Inspired by Art Flash Fiction Challenge by Globe Soup. (Thanks so much to Cherie for suggesting this one!) I’m off now to do some slow contemplation of my own.