What if (a wild summoning) the memoir workshop had never come to be (as in, never before, in the history of humankind, had there been a memoir workshop), and the only instruction on the craft of character development was espoused by portrait artists? By Tamara de Lempicka, say, the Art Deco artist who painted, in her words, “clean,” and chose, as her subjects, those who made her “vibrate.” Or by Vincent Van Gogh, who, in a letter to his brother Theo, wrote of the “modern portrait” as an opportunity to conjure “something of the eternal” through the use of the “actual radiance and vibration of our coloring.”
How might our literary portraits radiate? How might we color our sentences? How might the words “clean” and “vibrate” inform the way we write about the people in our stories?
Or: What might we learn from the sequence of portraits painted of the treasure-hunter and museum-maker Isabella Stewart Gardner? John Singer Sargent painted her both at the height of her powers (bold, provocative, declarative) and late in life (ephemeral, suggestive, soul). Anders Zorn painted her as gesture, a woman inseparable from her context. Before either Sargent or Zorn put Gardner down in paint, James Whistler rendered her in chalk and pastels. He focused on feeling and form.
Whistler kept the features of Gardner’s face indistinct. The background neutered. The time of day. He whispered her toward us. Gardner, in Whistler’s hands, is a distinctly present mystery, a character who has our attention.
To write like Whistler painted Gardner is to craft sentences that sound like confidences, something whispered with intimate intent. It is to elevate those one or two things that prove to be indelibly revealing. It is to choose scenes or moments that contain elements of innuendo or suggestion. It is to evoke a quietly propulsive sense of mystery.
It is to write, in other words, like Michael Ondaatje in Running in the Family: “My grandmother died in the blue arms of a jacaranda tree. She could read thunder.”
I have thought a lot about the alchemical lessons of painters and musicians as a writer who has lately turned to art. I’ve built a four-part series that has emerged from this obsession. It’s called “Taking Flight.” It starts September 28th. I hope you’ll join me.