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brushstrokes in verse: when painters write poetry about their own work

Sep 1

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There is a quiet alchemy that happens when an artist steps away from the canvas, sets down the brush, and reaches for a pen. Some painters leave their worlds in pigment alone, but others continue the conversation in words as parallel creations. The poem becomes an extension of the painting, offering another way in. In these moments, the artist does not change mediums so much as translate visions, carrying color into cadence and line into language. What begins as an image on canvas finds a second life on the page, where meaning shifts but the mystery endures.


“Painting is like writing in colors.” — Etel Adnan



William Blake


William Blake, the most famous of these double creators, understood that image and text could breathe together. His illuminated manuscripts illustrated poems and fused visual and verbal imagination into one unified artwork. The Tyger roars on the page both as verse and as a fierce, flame-hued engraving. In Blake’s hands, the poem is not a commentary on the image, nor the image a servant to the poem. They are twins, born of the same mind.


Poem & Painting:

“Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

hat immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”


Blake’s lines appear in The Tyger (1794), set directly within his own hand-colored engraving of a tiger, glowing orange against a dark, enchanted forest.



Illustrated poem "The Tyger" by William Blake, featuring text and a colorful tiger against a natural backdrop with decorative borders.
Blake's artwork

Leonora Carrington


This pairing of brush and pen is not limited to the Romantic era. In the surrealist salons of the mid-20th century, Leonora Carrington painted dreamscapes populated with white horses, elongated women, and cryptic rituals. She then wrote short prose-poems that seemed to walk out of the frame. Her words mirrored her canvases as playful, eerie, and charged with the logic of dreams. She didn’t “explain” the paintings. Instead, she poetically whispered a second layer of mystery. 


In Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) (1937–38), Carrington sits calmly beside a hyena while a spectral white horse leaps through an open window—a vision as uncanny as her short surreal texts. A different facet of her imagination emerges in The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (c. 1947), where a towering woman cradles a glowing egg at her center while birds circle in ritual flight. These works reveal the breadth of her private mythology, poems and paintings that live in parallel, each deepening the other’s dreamlike charge.


Prose-Poem:

“I remember the egg,

round as the sun,

and the horse who drank the light.”


Her prose-poem and painting echo one another like twin riddles, each amplifying the surreal charge of her imagination.


Check out the painting at https://apollo-magazine.com/leonora-carrington/



David Jones


For David Jones, a modernist poet and painter, the impulse was devotional. His watercolors and engravings of Celtic myth and Christian ritual echo through his long poem The Anathemata (1952). The same figures, objects, and symbols reappear across mediums, transformed but recognizable, as though paint and ink shared a single root.


Poem & Painting:

“…the tree lifts up its arms

and the Cross is raised again,

where banners stream in blood and light,

and kingship is a thorn.” (The Anathemata)


This imagery resonates with his watercolor Vexilla Regis (1947), where Christ’s crucifixion is entwined with streaming banners—visual and verbal devotion intertwined.


Check out the painting at https://scotland.op.org/david-jones-vexilla-regis/



Etel Adnan


In more contemporary circles, Etel Adnan’s small, radiant landscapes in oil find their companions in her poetry collections such as Sea and Fog (2012). Her words dwell on the same mountains and horizons she paints—Mount Tamalpais appearing again and again in both language and pigment, a constant presence in her artistic life. Adnan once said that painting was her “way of writing in colors.” For her, there was no boundary between the two.


Poem & Painting:

“the mountain

is a white stone

it rises

like the first question”


This short poem echoes her block-color canvases of Mount Tamalpais, where the mountain appears as an eternal presence, distilled into light and form.


Check out the painting at https://www.artsy.net/artwork/etel-adnan-mount-tamalpais



Why Paintings Become Poems


Why does this crossover happen? Perhaps because painting and poetry are both acts of condensation, attempts to distill an experience into its most charged form. A painter might spend days layering pigment to capture the essence of a shadow, then realize there is still more to say—something that lives in sound, in metaphor, in the cadence of a line break.


When painters write about their own work, it is not about describing their artwork, they are creating a second piece, one that refracts the image rather than reflects it. The poem may contradict the painting, complicate it, or expand it into territory pigment can’t reach. In this way, they form a diptych across mediums.


For the reader-viewer, this offers a rare invitation: to see twice. First, with the eyes, taking in shape, color, movement. Then, with the inner ear, hearing how the artist names and reframes that same vision in language. It’s an act of translation across senses, a reminder that no single medium can hold an entire truth.


Next time you encounter a painting accompanied by the artist’s own poem, resist the urge to see one as the “explanation” of the other. Instead, think of them as two siblings telling different versions of the same family story, each voice complete, each illuminating the other in unexpected ways.


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