Writing and Painting: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

October 24, 2021 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

It’s not really surprising that so many authors are also artists – the disciplines are two sides of the same coin. You can write a story in pictures and you can paint a picture with words. If you are blessed – or cursed – with a creative streak that creativity will out.

I come from a long line of shoemakers and lacemakers, so the need to create has always driven me. When small, I made paper dolls and matchstick models. Later, I sewed clothes for my children, and did patchwork, embroidery, and woodcarving, reupholstered chairs, made rocking horses, and designed and built gardens.

I came to painting in my late thirties as a kind of therapy – art and reading kept me sane, well relatively sane, at a difficult point in my life, and I owe much to Douglas Adams and his wonderful alternative reality, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but I didn’t begin writing until I was about sixty. I’d never aspired to be an author.

Painting, reading, and writing are fundamentally escapism. In both pictures and words, the wielder of brush, pen, or keyboard must be an observer of life, able to focus on the minute detail as well as the broader picture. It’s paying due attention to detail that allows us to escape the humdrum and the day-to-day problems we all face: it’s like mindfulness or meditation in that respect.

For example, when I look at a hedgerow, I don’t see a hedge. I see patterns of light and dark, sunlight and shadow on twigs and branches, brambles with their leaves turning crimson at the edges, and blackberries left to shrivel and dry. Gorse bears its bright, hopeful flowers now, and even in the depth of winter. There’s a rabbit sitting motionless under a little arch of bracken, blending beautifully with the russets of autumn and hoping I won’t see him, though he’s watching me. Seed heads of hogweed and hemlock stand tall and are swathed with dew-covered cobwebs, at the centre of which sit fat-bodied spiders. A cock blackbird is eying the bounty of hard, purple-black sloes amid the blackthorn’s vicious spines. There’s a chill in the air that heralds winter.

I have painted this kind of scene in watercolours using pigments like burnt sienna, brown madder, cobalt, and ultramarine blue, and now I’ve painted the same picture in words. Two sides of the same coin. It’s all down to observation, really, and how you see the world, and it determines an artist’s or writer’s style. And it’s quite revealing.

If you look at any of my paintings, you’ll see the obsessive need I have to show detail, to have things clear, transparent, and unmuddied – controlled. This says a lot about me as a person – I’m a bit of a control-freak, introverted, slightly OCD, and I like things unambiguous, simple, ordered, and uncluttered, if a little on the wild side on occasion – my life is more organised chaos than chaotic organisation – and this carries over into my writing.

Mainly, I paint seascapes, because I love the raw, emotional power of the sea and the stalwart roots of the earth, the cliffs, that wage their daily battle to hold back the tide with a little more success than Canute. Standing on the shoreline with the ocean raging reduces me to the minute being I am. It’s like looking up at a sky breath-taking with stars and realising what insignificant specks of humanity we all are. Even this precious planet we inhabit is but a dust mote to be too-easily brushed off the canvas of space. It puts life into perspective.

I count myself fortunate to live in beautiful West Wales, close to sandy beaches and wild, windswept moorland, where there are dark skies full of stars.

And just as I can’t paint a subject that I don’t feel passionate about, so I need a story to stir me before I can write it, and when I write it, I imbue it with my own passion and my own life experiences even if some of the views I portray are not my own. I write about love and loss, injustice, battles for equality, our planet, family, and humanity and inhumanity. I don’t shrink from showing man’s brutality – we are all of us capable of doing things of which we are, or should be, ashamed.

Being a control freak, I like to make my own book covers. I don’t profess to be very good at it, but the artist in me loves playing with Photoshop, and I like to put something of how I see the story into the cover. I make my cover before I begin writing, which is rather a back-to-front way of doing it, but it helps me envisage the scenario and the tone of the story. Also, I get satisfaction, as an Indie author, from creating every part of the book myself.

I write mainly historical fiction, and this has become my love. I’ve always been interested in history, how society became what it is, and the ordinary people who have sculpted it. Also, I find the necessity of following historical fact gives me the structure my OCD-self demands. I’ve tackled the Holocaust, transportation to the colonies, religious intolerance, the waste that was WW1, the fights for a living wage and women’s suffrage, and the rise of Hitler.