Painting Between the Lines: An Exploration of Literature and Poetry Through Watercolor

Ever since I was a little girl I have been proud of my handwriting. I remember learning cursive in the third grade and becoming mesmerized by the logicality and beauty of it all – the way the letters so seamlessly transitioned into one another as if they were on a runaway train that couldn’t stop to take a break. I used to love to take notes in class, barely processing what the teacher was saying, instead paying extreme attention to the conformity and near-perfectness of the words on the page. In today's age, with word processing and printers that perfectly align the letters for you, there is something increasingly special about the sight of a handwritten letter. Penmanship is something that I have always had an affinity towards and that I had never been able to explore before coming to Union College.

Additionally, as an English major at Union, I have always had a passion for reading and writing. I feel very strongly that all anyone needs to learn about the world can be found in a good book. Through my time here, I have had the opportunity to read and analyze some incredible pieces of literature and poetry and, although it may sound like a cliché, these works have become an important part of my life. Language can be extraordinarily powerful, and I have wanted to share its beauty with the people that I love for some time now.

The inspiration for my show, Painting Between the Lines: An Exploration of Literature and Poetry Through Watercolor, derived from these two interests. It happened rather suddenly the winter of my sophomore year at Union, when I was taking the introduction to watercolor class. Around the same time, I was studying Alexander Pope for an English class on Romanticism and I stumbled across a quote that I was familiar with, but that I had no idea was written by Pope: “How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.” I had known of the quote because my favorite movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, alludes to it in both title and theme and, after reading the quote in Pope’s eighteenth century poem, Eloise to Abelard, I instantly fell in love with its meaning all over again. How wonderful to be unaware and blissfully ignorant of the harsh realities that plague so many! After rediscovering the quote and feeling moved by its message, I simply decided that I wanted to incorporate it in a painting. Without any idea where I was actually headed, I asked for a big scroll of watercolor paper from my Professor and instinctively began illustrating the quote in significance and meaning. It was all rather straightforward. I used masking fluid for words like “blameless” and “spotless” to portray their purity, illustrated the word “sunshine” in warm shades, and idealized the background with relaxing colors and an overgrown pink flower. I really don’t remember ever having to stop and think about what I was doing, it all came so naturally. Thus began the catalyst that was my senior thesis.

Returning to the studio at the beginning of this year with the freedom to do anything I wanted with my concentration, I knew two things for sure. One was that I wanted to continue the precedence I set with my Alexander Pope painting, the second that I wanted to work in watercolor. I love oil painting, and I believe that it certainly has its place in the fine arts world, but the freedom that watercolor gives the artist is unparalleled. First of all, I feel watercolor has an advantage over oil painting when it comes to working with big surfaces. It moves broadly and easily across large pieces of paper and takes very little technical skill or time to cover a surface with an even coat of the paint. What’s more, the nature of watercolor perfectly lends itself to swift movements and calligraphy-like brush strokes. When painting out words, it is not ideal to have to constantly go back to the pallet to reapply the paint. Watercolor brushes absorb the pigment entirely and distribute it evenly and continuously, allowing the calligraphy to be uninterrupted. Watercolor is also extremely versatile. You can use the color right out of the tube when it is rich in pigment, or dilute it down so that it is barely even noticeable. You can create effects with the timing of applying the paint, allowing it to dry to create layered surfaces or painting rapidly to let the colors run. You can let the colors slide down the page to create drip effects, tap a wet paintbrush above it to create a splattered look, or sprinkle salt on top of the wet surface to create a puckered halo. The possibilities are endless, and I enjoyed employing as many as I could in my work this year.

I started off in September knowing precisely what I wanted my first piece of text to be. When I was in high school, a student from the grade above me passed away in a car accident, and on his memorial forum was a poem by Robert Frost entitled Nothing Gold Can Stay. Like the Pope quote from two years earlier, I knew I had heard of the poem previously, but I could not place from what or where it came. I immediately became fixated with it, as a result of both its beauty and its message, and because it seemed so familiar to me. Sometime later on, I realized that the poem was referenced in one of my favorite books as a little girl The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton. The poem was beloved by one of the characters in the book, Johnny, and as he lies dying at the end, he tells his best friend, Ponyboy, to “Stay gold.” My discovery of the poem in the context of young death and its place in The Outsiders has struck a chord with me ever since, and I could not wait to convey its meaning in art. I decided to illustrate it in a similar manner as I did the Pope quote, using masking fluid to paint a background reminiscent of the sunset (“so dawn goes down to day/nothing gold can stay”) and illustrating the individual words in significance and meaning—using gold leaf paint for the word “gold,” using the colors of the rainbow for the word “hue,” enclosing “flower” and “leaf” in actual images of a rose plant, having the o in “hour” be a clock, etc. I struggled a big at the top of the painting, experimenting with crayon and then trying to cover up my mistake with acrylic paint, and although at first the result really bothered me, I have grown to accept it as part of the overall visual image.

The next painting I began was the frame, which—after months of working on it on and off—turned into an excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s post-modern novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Initially, I began the frame with the intention of putting a quote from Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet inside. I had no idea what I was getting into when I simply found an image of a nice antique frame online. I started by lightly outlining the details, but it was only once I began filling them in with watercolor did I realize what an enormous feat it was going to be. The amount of detail I chose to include, from every little depression and scallop to the subtle highlights of the metal, was extremely time consuming. This painting turned into a project that I would continue on and off throughout the rest of fall and winter term. Whenever I needed a break from another painting, I would reach for the frame and pick up where I had left off. Although it was the most time consuming painting I worked on throughout this process, I think the end result goes to show for it. After finishing the frame, I decided to forego the idea of using Shakespeare (having already had used the Macbeth quote at this point) and instead knew that Vonnegut would be a perfect fit for an image like this. As a post-modern novel, Vonnegut’s use of the phrase “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” in Slaughterhouse-Five is satirical. Billy, the main character, says this phrase in regards to war, which Vonnegut then inserts would make a good epitaph for Billy, and the author too (ah, the self-reflexivity of post-modernism). The point of the statement being that, in war, as is often the case in life, nothing is beautiful and everything hurts. I thought the idea of putting this statement inside a beautiful antique frame would elevate the irony to a whole new level. In the novel, Vonnegut includes an illustration of the saying in the form of an actual epitaph, the style of which I attempted to replicate to make the allusion all the more obvious. The text and illustration of the putto in my frame are identical to that in the novel.

While working on the frame, I also began work on the Macbeth painting. The idea for the painting started with my interest in ampersands. I spent some time on Pinterest—a visual discovery website that allows you to search for inspiration—looking at different styles of ampersands. I wanted the ampersand to be the main focus of the painting, so I decided to use the Shakespeare quote, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” from the play Macbeth. I thought the repetition of the word “tomorrow” would work well with an oversized ampersand floating behind it. This painting was probably the most challenging, format-wise. It took a lot of sketching and erasing to make the text proportioned, uniformed, and centered evenly in front of the ampersand. It also took me a while to arrive at the color scheme I wanted for this painting. I decided on purple, both to evoke Macbeth’s royalty, and because it was a color that wasn’t used in many of my previous paintings. After painting the text, the letters were hard to make out at the places they overlapped with the ampersand, which is why I chose to outline them in charcoal. I am really happy with the effect that the charcoal has on the painting. Not only does it allow the words to truly pop, but it also gives the painting a certain depth and dimensionality.

Another painting that I did while the frame was still in process was the Ulysses one, which began as something of an accident. I was getting frustrated with the frame and needed to take a break, so I decided to tack up some pieces of paper I found in the studio and splatter lines of paint across them.  After taking out my energy on this for a while, I stood back and realized that the layering of the paper mirrored the effect I had done with the lines. Although I originally had no intention of turning these scraps into a piece for my show, I began experimenting with ways to arrange them. I decided to paint a colorful background on a larger piece of paper and adhere the scraps on top in their original formation. At this point, I had decided I wanted to somehow incorporate the ending lines of James Joyce’s Ulysses into the painting. The literary style of the ending of the novel is a stream of consciousness, so I used a variety of bright colors and streamlined techniques for the background. Fused together in a continuous, yet also somewhat disorganized way, the colors run into one another and drip down the page—a representation of the character’s thoughts. I wrote the text right on top of the scrap paper in the same manner they had originally been arranged, which left a moderately sized square in the middle. I painted the background of this square red, to symbolize the passion that Molly feels in this moment and schema of the human body—with all it’s visceral descriptions—that Joyce employs throughout Ulysses. After adhering the pages together, I couldn’t help but keep on painting the way it felt right, outlining the paper into segments of geometric squares and splattering paint here and there. Lastly, I added a ribbon of border around the text, to keep the words contained and to emphasize Molly’s flowing thoughts.

I started the William Blake Ah! Sunflower painting towards the end of fall term. I discovered the poem a few years ago and was excited to use it in the show. I enjoy painting flowers and I loved the cadence of the poem, so I thought it would lend itself really well to my work. I used masking fluid to outline the sunflower, which allowed me to paint the background a bright and colorful tie-dyed pallet of blue, yellow and red. I employed cross-hatching for the shading, to give the petals volume, and decided on carbon print for the text, to give the painting a more antiqued look. I couldn’t fit the entire lines text on the page, so I decided to scatter the last couple words below each line, to enhance the sensation that they were typed on a whim.

The Song of Solomon painting only took me a day or two in the studio. I wanted to do a quick painting, as a break between my other, more complex ones, and I decided to use a quote from my favorite Toni Morrison novel. The verses are from a folk song that the main character, Milkman, discovers in connection to his past. The song implies that, when men free themselves from oppression, they often leave women behind—a theme that resonates throughout the novel. I wanted to entertain the folk-aspect of the song, so I chose a native and earth-toned color scheme. I subtly highlighted various words within the poem in different colors, to enhance their repetition, and made a border around the frame to bring the whole painting to life. The feather—another inspiration from Pinterest—symbolizes flying as a means of escape. The epigraph reads, “The father’s may soar/And the children may know their name.” The feather is an ode to the prospect of flight as a way to break free from constricting circumstances, just as Milkman does at the end of the novel.

I began the Sea Fever painting midway through winter term, as an escape from the terribly cold and dreary season we were having. The poem, by John Masefield, has been special to my family for three generations. My grandmother used to say it to my mother before tucking her in bed at night, and my mother would do the same for me as well. I have had the poem memorized for as long as I can remember, and we even have a tile of it hanging in our mudroom. I wanted the painting to be as blue and deep as the sea itself. I again used masking fluid (clearly an invaluable material in my process) for the script. I then gathered every blue plaint I had, along with some sea green and purple one, and proceeded to paint, spread, drip and splatter the colors across the page. Afterwards, I sprinkled salt all over, both as a symbolic representation of the sea, and for the puckered effect that it created. Pulling off the masking fluid after the paint had dried, and seeing the pure white text materialize among the deep-sea blues, was a wonderfully satisfying moment.

The last painting I did this past term was a Hemingway quote from the novel, The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway is my all-time favorite author. I have always revered him for the pithy and simplicity, yet the complete power, of his prose. These are the final lines in the novel, and the lament over what could have been between the novel’s two main characters—who are in love but can never be together—is truly poignant. I wanted to express this notion, of looking into the hypothetical past and the desolate future, with the changing of seasons. Of course, I used masking fluid for the text, which I decided to condense into the middle of the page to illustrate the character’s entrapment in their situations. I painted the background with no thought. I wasn’t going for a realistic look, I just wanted to paint nature—something that Hemingway goes into great and detailed descriptions of in his writing—almost as a little kid would of, layering the seasons from bottom to top. I started at the bottom with a dead and dry earth, moving up to a thick and luscious forest, then to the winter cold of the mountains above, and finally a summer sunset at the top.