Working on a Novel About an Artist? Write Like a Painter

When Pablo Picasso was 19, his best friend killed himself. The struggling artist soon began wandering from the Montmartre apartment where he was crashing in 1901 to the Saint-Lazare women’s prison and sanitorium. The bleak facility’s inmates often had been arrested for solicitation or petty crime, then detained because they carried syphilis, which back then was an incurable disease that might lead to blindness, disfigurement, madness or death. Tumbling into a cavernous depression, Picasso decided to paint the people he found confined here, many of them mothers locked away alongside their children.

While writing The Blue Period, a novel exploring the years during Picasso’s youth when he depicted the downtrodden in nocturnal shades, I drenched myself in these haunting Saint-Lazare portraits—Femme aux Bras Croisés, Femme Assise au Fichu, Maternité—and reflected on the means by which the canvasses so concisely express the troubles of our existence.

How might writers, I began to ask, bring such poignancy and pathos to the page?

Novelists and painters each endure trials in rendering experience and attempting to convey meaning. The latter calling, however, gives rise to some distinct fixations: using light, shadow, color, contrast, texture, perspective, gesture and facial expression, for example, to evoke viewers’ strong sentiments. In addition, canvasses provide tightly constrained spaces for painters to accomplish their work, so composition becomes paramount. Writers will relate to these challenges, but we don’t always confront them with such fanaticism—until we set out to write about artists. Then arrives the obstacle of trying to absorb these obsessions so that our books share the same intensity as those indelible pictures we covet.

To draft her novel about Vincent van Gogh, for instance, Nellie Hermann pored over a trove of his letters, hung prints on the wall, and went for long walks just as the artist had—all while visually deconstructing everything in sight. It was during one such trek in the countryside that Hermann paused to look out at a field of tall grass—watching the way the light hit it, scrutinizing how the rhythmic movement of the blades blurred their individual colors.

When I read the breathtaking passage in The Season of Migration that this meticulous dissection inspired, I could only compare my feeling to the frisson of rounding the corner at a museum and suddenly gazing upon one of van Gogh’s works.

I phoned Hermann in Paris recently to let her know how much her novel moved me after my years of endeavoring to write like a painter. We talked about Williams Carlos Williams, who might be considered the patron saint of such pursuits, and I told her that her book frequently reminded me of the poet-and-sometimes-novelist’s insistence, “Say it, no ideas but in things”—to shun concepts, that is, and instead find significance in constellations of objects, people and animals, just as artists have done for centuries.

In particular, I pointed to a chapter when van Gogh recalls a farm with “a sea of moving brown feathers, a din of squawks” clucking over peach-colored eggs. Nearby, other chickens have been beheaded: “a stain of red across a patch of sandy earth, a row of bodies hanging upside down on hooks, below them little buckets full of blood.” These lines marvelously represent both Williams’ credo and van Gogh’s early art, I suggested.

Hermann described how after spending so much time trying to inhabit the mind and body of the artist, she finally was able to translate that vision onto the page. In studying van Gogh’s correspondences, she said, it’s clear how closely he observed everything inside his environment, which is a quality writers should strive for. “I think we all have that capacity in us. If you’re moving through life it only takes an extra 30 seconds,” Hermann said. “The pleasure of writing a novel about van Gogh was how it allowed that to come out of me.”

While it was a 19th-century post-Impressionist who helped Hermann capture the full resonance of rural areas and mining settlements in the Low Countries, she added that “the same principle applies to if you’re describing a New York City landscape and looking at what’s on the shelves in a bodega.”

In fact, the other recent book that I’ve admired for its painterly flourishes and command is Halsey Street, a contemporary künstlerroman by Naima Coster that partially takes place in Brooklyn.

It’s possible Coster is even alluding to Williams’ rallying cry when, early on, someone dismisses the protagonist’s portfolio as nothing but “object studies.” The criticism hurts “Penelope,” but she accepts this is what her art is—while readers can see that the intended knock could easily apply to much of what’s hanging in the Louvre.

Halsey Street is a complex novel that achieves many feats, but my favorite is the way it can be read as a treatise on how artists derive meaning from their surroundings and communicate this in the images they produce. In doing so, the author weaves her character’s aesthetics as a painter into the writing itself, filling the pages with starkly poetic inventories of what Penelope encounters as she and company travel back and forth between Bedford-Stuyvesant and the Dominican Republic.

Take, for example, Coster’s melancholy picture of a family being evicted from a brownstone. As a dark van full of “upturned furniture and rolled-up rugs, stacks of brown boxes sealed with silver duct tape” is parked on the curb, a girl sits on the stoop beside a handball: “Her hair was splayed around her face, unbrushed and afloat in the currents of wind. She watched the men smoke, took up the blue ball and tossed it between her hands.”

Like the hens’ eggs at the farm van Gogh witnessed, there’s something so perfect and piercing about the handball. It is this object that gives the scene the sting of stepping on broken glass.

Coster does not reveal Penelope’s artistic influences, but Halsey Street often reminds me of the Ashcan School, an early 20th-century movement that brought social realism and moody urban tableaux to the forefront of American painting. The similarity is furthered by a motif whereby scenes are cast from the vantage of Penelope looking through a window or door, or with characters placed in front of one—the sash window of Penelope’s childhood home, the porthole in the cramped attic where she lives, the curtained glass at a soul food spot on Nostrand Avenue, the rolled-up car window during her ride to the airport.

In each case, the narrator lavishes us with such vivid descriptions that these feel like framed masterpieces. The effect resembles the way Edward Hopper, an Ashcan acolyte, used windows as internal frames in Nighthawks, Automat, Hotel Window, or New York City Office to invite viewers to recognize the unnoticed artistry in everyday life. Framing also has a special importance in Halsey Street, with Coster noting that Penelope—who, like many young painters before her, is struggling to define her identity in an unjust world ripe with despair, and, at the same time, to navigate fraught relationships—never frames her work, a habit begun in childhood by her mother, who didn’t value it.

This clever device highlights how what Penelope sees is connected to the art she creates, while also making a parallel between pictures one encounters in galleries and prose on the page. What’s more, it can be regarded as a sly wink at the author’s own process of learning to adopt from the visual arts.

As Hermann attested on the phone, whether telling the story of van Gogh, Picasso, or an invented artist, “that is absolutely the gift of writing about a painter.”

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Luke Jerod Kummer’s The Blue Period is out now from Little A.