The Writer’s Brush
My friend Maureen and I went to an exhibit at the Pierre Ménard Gallery in Cambridge the other day based on the book The Writer’s Brush. The gallery, in an ancient house on Arrow Street not far from Harvard Yard, had just two smallish rooms and a basement space and the paintings, all by writers, lined the walls ceiling to floor. It was great to see such a mishmash of work and by so many authors—e e cummings, Sylvia Plath (who did the painting you see here), Borges, Gunter Grass, Victor Hugo, Maurice Sendak, Patti Smith. A very eclectic group and the paintings ranged from inept to brilliantly executed. Gunther Grass had a strong, clear hand, for one. I loved e e cummings best—his paintings of both men and women were full of eroticism and humor. They had more than a faint hint of the amateur but it lent the paintings a charm that cannot be designed. All the work felt like artifacts of fine adventurous lives. There is something fantastic about seeing the actual hand of a writer whose work you’ve loved.
What amazed me was just how many writers paint. I’ve always felt powerfully drawn to both writing and art and have practiced both all my life. Writing is where my true energy is now but there is still the need to make art. They are different muses—I can hardly say how though one is linear and narrative obviously, the other tactile. They are different ways of playing, like we experience in different friendships. But one is as necessary as the other. This show really made me aware of how wondrous the whole range of personal expression is—not just writing and art, but mastery and ineptitude too. There’s no need to judge or place things in a hierarchy of good and bad it seems to me. Everything that spills from the human hand holds some kind of magic in it. Sometimes it’s the small inept work that touches us more than we know. A tiny line drawing of a tiger from Victor Hugo, for instance.
This whole crowded mishmash of an exhibit, with the prices typed on peel-off labels stuck onto the wall, half askew, and a few missing, made me think this is how we ought to see art—in a casual way, like it’s part of everyday life and not a precious, ghastly serious thing. By the way—some of the prices for this everyday art were in the stratosphere—$25,000 and more. May we who feel compelled to draw and paint live long!
I’m so happy to announce that Allan’s book, 
