"Tell me," the poet E.E. Cummings once wrote, in dialogue with himself, "doesn't your painting interfere with your writing?"
"Quite the contrary," he replied. "They love each other dearly."
Cummings was an artist to be reckoned with, a painter and cartoonist in the 1920s for The Dial, the art and literary magazine. Several of his deft, surprisingly romantic canvases hang in "The Writer's Brush: Visual Art by Writers" at Pierre Menard Gallery, a surprising, informative, and sometimes comic grab bag of art by people we think of more as wordsmiths. The show was sparked by the similarly titled book by Donald Friedman.
There have always been artists who practice both visual art and literature. The show dishes up a wild array of them, from the accomplished painter Victor Hugo, who has a tiny, brooding, Turneresque landscape here, to contemporary graphic novelist Daniel Clowes.
Scores of paintings, drawings, and prints hang salon style, clamoring for attention on the gallery's walls, in no clear order. It's the perfect way to see this exhibition. The viewer sets out on a treasure hunt; around any corner, you may find a drawing by Maurice Sendak, a painting by Annie Dillard, or prints by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Many of the works are good, but even the ones that are clumsy (sorry, Annie Dillard) throw up a quirky new lens through which to view its author.
Look at Tennessee Williams. Williams painted his whole life, and he sold his work. "Carnival," his painting of a young hunk in pink pants, surrounded by a riot of gestures in pale tones, is cartoonish, slightly mawkish, a little lascivious, and pretty much bereft of technique, but you can see in it the longing and struggle with idealism and innocence we know from his plays.
Many works here are rigorous. The early 20th-century Czech writer and artist Josef Vachal's prints from the 1930s are expertly done, nightmarish and darkly surrealistic. Like Vachal, Günter Grass is as much an artist as he is a writer; his etching "Butt Uber Land," in which a gigantic, bloated flounder hovers over the horizon, followed the publication of his 1977 novel "Der Butt" ("The Flounder").
From jottings to fully realized paintings, "The Writers Brush" brims with revelations that will entertain lovers of literature and art alike.
Coming and going
Two motifs mark the work of Esther Solondz. She makes images on the verge of vanishing, exploring either a moment of coming into being or a moment of loss. And she does it with restless technical invention, creating images out of materials that themselves undergo change, erosion, and dissolution, such as iron filings and salt.
Her new show at Gallery NAGA features portraits made with those materials, as well as mud and hummingbird nectar, dripped from a hummingbird feeder that she set up in her Vermont studio. It adds a pink glow to "Duchess of Portland," a woman's portrait in mud, infusing the haze she rises from with brightness. The mud and blush seem almost fixed within the paper pulp, rather than sitting on the page's surface. The paper's texture becomes another net that cannot quite hold the person passing through, but captures a fleeting impression. This artist's work aches with longing.
Paul Rahilly's sharp, comic, brilliantly painted canvases portray odd scenes that suggest allegory, but evade pat meaning. Perhaps a work such as "The Bacchus Family," also on view at NAGA, is more an opportunity to artfully capture the swell and luster of flesh and fabric, the antic gestures of tree branches, and the sheen of a brass wine jug than it is to tell a story, but half the fun is trying to make sense of the tale.
Here, Bacchus swigs his wine. His wife, clad in a paper skirt, holds a toddler son close. An anxious daughter, fully dressed, stands ramrod straight beside her mother; she's the anti-Bacchus. The scene takes place outside a mausoleum, a chilly symbol of death that you'd think would sober up even the party god. Narrative riddles like this make Rahilly's masterfully painted canvases that much more alluring.
French suite
While Kader Attia's theatrical and stark installation "Sleeping From Memory" remains up at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the French artist has a smaller show at Samson Projects. It's a documentation of his installation on the Canary Islands in 2006. Suites of color photographs capture the work, which featured altar-shaped mirrors on a rocky beach, little doorways of sunlight and water aglow in the scrappy landscape. The photos are lovely, but they only make you wish you'd been there.
There's one sculpture, as well - a small translucent box filled with mirrored shards, which viewers are encouraged to shake. Samson Projects' owner, Camilo Alvarez, says Attia was commissioned to make the piece after being a finalist for, but not winning, the Marcel Duchamp Prize. Awarded annually by the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art to a promising French artist, it's France's version of the British Turner Prize. Alvarez calls the commission a "consolation prize." In the context of this show, the piece has the same disappointed flavor - we came to see Attia's work, and all we got were these photos, and a bitter little sculpture.
