I love it when writers respond to other art forms. Over the past few years I’ve seen exhibits and books which show the interplay between painting and poetry, stories and photography, plays and music. Any art form can be used successfully as inspiration and it shows me that the creative impulse is the same, no matter what you do with it.

I have done this with my own work. There is a poem I wrote specifically for my latest collection, Her Life Collected, in which I took myself on a field trip to the National Gallery in search of some painting I had never seen before by a painter I had never heard of. The result is a poem called “Arresting Colours” which responds to a painting by Pierre Mignard, 1691(you can read it below).

But what I want to talk about today is how I have created a new ritual around my novel writing.  While I was writing my first novel, Tangled Roots, I came across a painting by a young Martha’s Vineyard artist, Kara Taylor. The painting was a collage of sorts of rural landscapes embedded with physics equations, of all things. It seemed to have been painted for my book, so I bought it. It hangs in my writing shed now. And it hangs above a second Kara Taylor painting which I found just as I was in the midst of writing A Clash of Innocents. I couldn’t believe then that there, yet again, was another Kara Taylor image which so clearly evoked the ideas that were percolating in my head, waiting to become words. Two novels, two paintings. So when I set down to work in my shack on novel 3, I knew something was missing. I needed a new painting and I hoped I would find another one by Kara. And of course, there it was — charming blue skies above a gnarled and troubled depth. Perfect! So now I have three novels and three paintings and a tradition of finding art that somehow represents my work and which I can sit beneath and respond to as I write.  For me, that’s an entirely new intersection between art forms, more of an interplay than a response. I love the whole idea of it, and I love the paintings. Here they are (sorry the photos don’t really do them justice):

for “A Clash of Innocents”

for “Tangled Roots” above, for novel 3 below

And here’s the poem for Mignard:

Arresting Colours

After “The Marquise de Seignelay and Her Two Sons”
by Pierre Mignard, 1691


Why does she look sad?
Her skin is so white, her cheeks red,
her brown hair inviting.
The youngest looks up at her with pleading adoration,
naked in his yearning, with silver wings.
The older stares beyond to a charcoal sky,
pinches of disdain wrinkling his lips.

Pierre Mignard: who is he
that he captures these colours so —

that unearthly white of one boy’s hand on electric blue,
violent red slipping off the baby’s flesh?

How dare he cross generations to arrest me here
in this pass-thru gallery with its paintings of no interest,
Christ again dripping on that cross?
How dare he capture my unsuspecting heart with his
deafening browns, cold golds, sheltering mauves,
deceitful greens?

I meant to pass by on my way to the café

but these colours drag me into his painting
and now all I can see is eyes: one child’s full of love,
the other’s of impatience, the mother’s
drowning in resignation. They stop me on my way,
make me sit on this polished bench,
swallowing the black of a sigh.