Words and pigments
Art
By Vijayan Kannampilly

A POET’S coins are words and his prize is sound — rhyme and rhythm, metre and cadence. A painter’s coins are colour and his prize is silence — line and form, form and composition. Yet, within the sound and the silence there is a revelation, a secret knowledge which comes through contemplation, and once learnt will not disappear. It is this core of meaning arrived at through vastly different means which makes the twin arts companions in a common search.

The personal histories of this companionship are well known Mallarme, for instance, was a daily visitor at the studio of Degas, and Rilke served for sometime as the secretary of Rodin.

In the modern period we have the close relationships which Apollinaire, Eluard, Aragon and Reverdy shared with Picasso, Matisse and Braque, or Lorca with Dali.

We also have examples of poets who were also painters and vice versa. In India, an example which springs to mind is Gulam Mohammad Sheikh. In the West we have Blake and in more recent times Cummings. These examples are of course only illustrative. Painters have also used their creativity to illustrate the works of poets. Picasso’s enormous output on this score and Hockney’s work on Cavafy’s poems are some cases in point. The reverse has also happened. The late Ted Hughes wrote his poem Crow to accompany an edition of Leonard Baskin’s crow engravings.

As opposed to this jugalbandi of sorts the history of the two arts also has another tradition not confined only to companionship and collaboration, but to comment as Paz did on Duchamp. By virtue of the fact that without words one cannot comment it is natural that in this area the poet is the commentator. Though painters could tend to see their illustrations as comments, more often than not the illustrations to succeed have to be as directly related to the verses as possible; painters picturise the poetry, they do not comment on it often.

A poet’s comments on paintings could of course be a piece of art criticism, and many poets have been art critics. For instance, in Delhi Keshav Mallik and Prayag Shukla are two names which come immediately to mind. However, when a poet approaches paintings as a subject and not as a personal response to a painter’s works or an exhibition, then we have the poet on painting. In India, as far as I know, the poets who have embarked upon this is Prayag Shukla and Vinod Bharadwaj in Hindi and K Satchidanandan in Malayalam, with Shukla also having curated ‘Drawing 94’ for Gallerie Espace. Yet, when all is said and done this tradition of one art, poetry, trying to explore and understand another art, painting, is not an old one in India. One reason is that painting unlike poetry is a recent entrant into the fellowship of ‘fine’ arts in this country. A major reason for this late acceptance is the fact that in a caste-stratified society where dignity of labour does not exist, any manual art despite tracing its practice to time-honoured treatises is not easily deemed worthy of this honour.

What attracts a poet to painting? Stephen Spender set out to answer this in an essay published in 1962. Spender was eminently qualified for this task because, besides being a poet of repute, he was also a student of painting under William Coldstream, professor at Slade School. In his essay, Spender makes the crucial point that "apart from (having) the organising power of the visual imagination (painters), observe what Blake called ‘minute particulars’. They create images and they store memories."

The creation of images, the act of image - making, is what unites the craft of the poet to that of the painter. The means are of course different. One uses words; the other pigments. But painters have also seen their craft and its art differently. Thus Van Gogh writes in a letter: "The strokes come with a sequence and coherence like words in a speech or letter." Matisse speaks of the harmony of colors as a "harmony analogous to that of a musical composition." It is probably this sound within the silence of a painting which enthrals the poet, while the imagery of the poet, real and tangible but expressed through the most abstract of human inventions, the word is what draws the painter to poetry. The two worlds are different and yet similar... and so very familiar.