The analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete. Their inspiration is the same, their process (allowing for the different quality of the vehicle) is the same, their success is the same. . . . Their cause is the same, and the honor of one is the honor of another. . . . As the picture is reality, so the novel is history.
—Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”
In a season of deep depression, I took up a brush and began to paint. I was nineteen years old in the summer of 1973, living with my parents in a small Kentucky town after dropping out of college in Arkansas. My mother suggested I take an art class, so I signed up at the local college where they had both found jobs. The class was in watercolor. I wasn’t very good at first. The paint dried so quickly. One had to think ahead about the spaces one wished to keep light. There was no such thing as erasing. Painting over could be accomplished by starting light and adding darks. But one could not go the other way around, from darks to lights. There were no pencils involved. One put paint to paper.
One could, however, wash. The first wash might be a pale pink across the top third of the page, perhaps a pale green across the lower two thirds. If one knew she wanted white clouds in the sky, she might leave space open. Then came another wash for the trees in the distance; another, darker wash for the barn in the left corner of the page, yet darker washes for the shrubbery in the foreground to the right. Then again one came back with darker washes to indicate individual trees, a wheelbarrow propped against the barn, and so on. Color upon color, deepening. One could err badly with too many washes. If one made it through this stage, one faced the requirements of detail. Careful indication of the depth and dimension of one window, not all of them. Intricate suggestion of the bark of one limb. Rust on the wheelbarrow. At last, one might indicate individual blades of grass in the foreground. What I ended up with didn’t look like the scene before me so much as an impression of the scene.