To see where you live, just listen to an artist

I very much feel the vibrations of particular places, to the point that they become unacknowledged characters in my fiction and poetry. I know I’m not alone, even among writers.

Visual artists are also engaged in observing closely and progressing beyond, if they may. Some are not shy about acknowledging their insights, either.

For a few examples, let’s start by turning to Jamie Wyeth’s commenting about Mohegan Island and then venture from there.

1. “You look at most paintings of gulls and they look like doves. If you really look at a gull, it is a beautiful bird, but it is a scavenger. It’s a mean, tough bird. To me they’re the sea more than anything else. The eye of a gull, you could paint a million seascapes and you don’t get the same sense of those eyes looking at you. They’re reptilian really.” Where I live, gulls are inescapable, even when you’d rather they weren’t.
2. As for living surrounded by water: “Houses on the island are of as much interest as the people. They’re hanging on as tenuously as the people are. Unlike buildings in Pennsylvania which almost grow out of the earth, I always feel that if a big wind comes, everything would be just swept away.” I’ve already posted on this, looking at the town’s gable-style Capes. No wonder I tremble under a heavy wind, as I did in March so long ago in Ohio!
3. “The danger with Maine is that it is so anecdotal and emblematic in terms of pretty houses, pretty lobster traps — ‘quaint’ things. Maine is not that way. Maine has a lot of edge, a lot of angst.”
4. On blue sea glass: “Maine people must have drunk an inordinate amount of Milk of Magnesia.” I don’t think we need to go there.
5. Taos Pueblo/Dine illustrator and designer Margeaux Abeyta also delivers some specifics: “I can’t count the times my father and I would take the long drive from Santa Fe to Gallup just for mutton sandwiches. … Every now and then we’d come across a perfect sky – a deep cobalt blue with rays of cerulean and clouds growing ever toward us as we drove under their long-cast shadows. They moved with one another in an effort to graze the land. Months later, I would recall our drive, lined on the canvas walls of his messy studio. He had documented that very day, an immortalized memory. Looking at across the room at half-finished canvases filled with underbrush of color, I saw the manifestations of a life lived. In this way, it became his own, his way to have a discourse with the world. Tracing back each part of himself, conversations and feelings embedded into each stroke, his very world as he dreamed it.” I must admit getting goosebumps just transcribing that rich passage. But she has more:
6. “When my grandmother would take me chokecherry picking deep in the shaded paths, we would lift the bottoms of our blouses to hold the berries, staining the cotton with maroon impressions. While hauling home our treasures, she told stories of her own childhood. When she and her friends would walk the same trails only to be met by an old brown bear, quickly they ran, as gems of red fell from their hands, rolling down the hill behind them. I would look back into that shaded path where berries grew and feel the immense power of this strange world. Falling back beside my grandmother, I knew I was safe in this place she called home.” I am awed by how much deep memories of color inflect emotions here. The red could as easily be blood.
7. Now for Alex Katz on his work done in New York City and Maine: “My paintings take all kinds of light. I’ve done a lot of night paintings, and twilight, and morning paintings. I think when people paint the same light all the time, it gets a little monotonous.” Do you ever think about the light where you live? Or the ways it inflects the colors your life?
8. British painter Clare Thatcher returns to that connection of color to emotion: “I select a palette I have felt when at the location. My line drawings in charcoal or pencil suggest color to me. I aim to capture the mood and sensation that transports me back there.” What are the colors of where you’re living?
9. For a bit of historical dimension, we have French master of the au plein Jean-Baptist Camille Corot: “I am struck upon seeing a certain place. While I strive for conscientious imitation, I yet never for an instant lose the emotion that has taken hold of me.” That points us back to the vibe.
10. Nick Bantock, meanwhile, looks at another kind of color: “Art is like therapy; what comes up is what comes up. It may be dark, but that’s what comes up. You may want to keep some of it in a drawer … but never judge it.

Well, I am trying to think of what would have been representative of my native Ohio or neighboring Indiana as well as what would have emotionally internalized as a result. I’ve been much more aware in my moves since, as a poet and as a novelist.

As Aristotle said, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” And also, Edward Hopper’s, “If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” Or, for me, to write.