"Let each man exercise the art he knows." (-Aristophones)

Have you ever known someone who just seems to need to create in some way? To dance, or sing, or sculpt, or paint, or play violin? I find the whole subject of creativity just fascinating.

Last year at Christmas time, Joe gave me the book The Writer’s Brush. It’s a wonderfully generous collection of artwork produced by people we know primarily as writers (such as Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Ionesco, Emily Bronte, Joseph Conrad, Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, ee cummings, Aldous Huxley, Yeats, Jack Kerouac, etc…) These writers evidently also felt compelled to create in other ways.

I find it interesting that all sorts of artists just seem to have an inherent need to create—if they’re writers not writing, they might also pick up a brush and paint instead. They may not excel in the same way at their "alternative" art, but they seem to need to create it just the same!

If they’re not creating music, like a Paul McCartney or a John Lennon, they sometimes evidently feel driven to express that creativity in some other way, and it sometimes evidences itself in artwork. John Lennon was known for his sketches, and Paul still paints. Interestingly, Joni Mitchell always thought of herself first as a painter, and only secondarily as a singer/songwriter/lyricist. (This cover painting was by the poet, Sylvia Plath.)

Artists obviously observe others in their individual metiers as well. I used to teach English literature to college students, and I often used these two examples of poets who wrote poems about a painting by Brueghel.

Little did Brueghel know, when he painted “The Fall of Icarus,” that two poets would address and interpret his brushstrokes in their own art of poetry. Here are two of my favorite poems, by WH Auden and William Carlos Williams, where they are discussing this painting:

Musee des Beaux Arts (-WH Auden)

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus (- William Carlos Williams)

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.” (-Simonides)