I began to paint in 2023, soon after I turned 70. At an age when I am rarely surprised, I feel I am channeling a new creative impulse while also returning to something from my past. As a young child, I was thought to be talented in art. When I was six, my father submitted one of my crayon drawings—a picture of trees done on brown newsprint paper—to a contest for children sponsored by our local museum. I won first prize, and I still have that drawing. Looking at it now, I can’t for the life of me see why it won the contest, unless there was a Cy Twombly fan among the judges. (I note a vague resemblance to the spidery work of that modernist artist.)
I left off drawing soon after. Words supplanted images as my primary source of fascination and occupation. I kept journals, I wrote stories and poems and sent them off to magazines, and I read books—triple deckers from the Victorian era especially—in which I could lose myself. The pliancy and complexity of language suited my developing psyche and my wish to both understand the world and escape from it. I was not a natural writer. I revised persistently until I was able to say approximately what I wanted—this painstaking process was part of the appeal. It fed my incipient OCD and confirmed my sense that writing was hard and hence worth doing. By the time I was an English graduate student in 1975, I was entirely a word-centered person.
For 50 years, I wrote: scholarly books and articles, then essays, stories, novels, reviews, and opinion pieces. Writing had become a compulsion. My every experience, feeling, and idea seemed to be waiting to be put on paper. Even if I suspected that a piece would never get published, I wrote it anyway. The late Nora Ephron liked to quote her mother’s edict: “Everything is copy.” I felt that if I didn’t write, I was letting good copy go to waste.
But as I arrived in my eighth decade, I had cycled through most of the topics that interested me. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that I had exhausted them. Anyone who writes for a living knows that even the most limited experiences can lead to many routes worth exploring. But I was getting tired of this kind of exploration. Writing took more effort now that my faculties were declining. I began to feel that it had become a chore, and this was reflected in the writing. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, a longstanding hero of mine, wrote, to feel obliged to be spontaneous renders spontaneity unlikely.
And so I found myself in a quandary during a sabbatical year that was to be a kind of trial run for retirement. College teaching had always given structure to my life as a writer. What would I do when I no longer had to prep for courses and meetings? I could go to the gym, take long lunches with friends, watch more television, do community service. But none of those things was going to satisfy my creative urge. I decided to pick up a pencil, not to write but to draw.
A slew of people who made their careers in other areas (George W. Bush is perhaps the most famous recent example) have found solace in visual art later in life. Closer to my line of work, Tennessee Williams and Herman Hesse took up painting as a sequel to writing. And I recently read about former Princeton historian Nell Painter, who (belatedly prompted by her name?) took the turn to visual art so seriously during her retirement that she went to art school in her 60s and emerged a serious professional artist.
I wasn’t aiming for anything so rigorous. But I did begin to carry a pencil and sketchbook with me everywhere and draw whatever I saw: a doorknob, a toaster, a ketchup bottle, furniture, flowers, and especially faces—the Verizon store security guard, the waiter at a restaurant, an array of family members and friends. During this early phase, I also frequented Philadelphia’s Sketch Club, the oldest continuously operated art club in the country, where I could spend hours drawing unclothed models for a minimal fee. It was exciting to study the human body so closely in communion with other artists. While we drew, a profound silence would descend on the room, broken only by the sharpening of pencils, as we concentrated on the model before us: the tattooed buttocks, the oddly shaved pubic hair, the protuberant beer belly. The trick was to capture, in this matrix of lines and shapes, a feeling of drama and humanity.
From drawing, I progressed to painting, eventually renting a small studio near my apartment where I could work without splattering paint on our guest-room carpet. As painting took over my life, I began to contemplate the differences between visual and literary art. It’s true that writing can involve a degree of immediacy and spontaneity—my best writing would always surprise me in the directions it took—but in general, I needed an argument, a set of characters, or a plot line to launch any essay or story. Visual art is more improvisational. Putting brush to canvas is more instinctual than putting pen to page. It feels like a return to an earlier, simpler phase of life. And isn’t that quality a large part of its appeal? The older I get, the more I look back with nostalgia at the innocence of my youth—of a time before I was immersed in social norms and conventions. To draw or paint, one must let go of reflexive ideas about how things look. One must see the world afresh, an antidote to the jadedness that can beset old age.
Yet ironically, the more I paint, the more I see how closely my painting resembles my writing. On canvas, I like to revise (oil paint is a forgiving medium), much as I would compulsively revise my writing. And I find that I am addressing aesthetic and structural questions that concerned me as a writer. When I say that my painting style has a kinship with my writing style, I wonder where this similarity comes from. Am I so conditioned by certain norms and ideas that they necessarily inform my work in both media? Or does my core self, some essential being that I carry with me and that constitutes my creative identity, assert itself in whatever expression I choose? Both are prison-houses of sorts, though I prefer the idea of a core creative self to that of a conditioned one.
Despite my forays into other subjects, the lure of depicting people’s faces is central to my urge to paint. Portraiture reflects, I believe, my attempt to deploy my core self in the service of the core self of another. What had eventually soured me on writing was its hermetic aspect. Even when imagining a fictional character or writing about a real one, I was closed in on myself. But in painting a portrait, I open up and attempt to inhabit, at least in part, the life of another person.
When I used to review art exhibitions, I was struck by how rarely contemporary artists—at least those who were critically successful—painted portraits of other people. I connected this to the rise of abstraction on the one hand and a need to escape the commercial aspects formerly associated with portraiture on the other (this even as contemporary art is increasingly tied to commerce). The issue seems to come down to a concern, which began during modernism, with authenticity, a value assumed to be compromised by painting people in a way they would like. This is why one of the greatest early modern portraitists, John Singer Sargent, fell out of favor. Sargent gave his subjects a statuesque air of dignity and attractiveness and took great care to paint their often sumptuous clothing and jewelry. This worked well for him for much of his career, but during the Bloomsbury ascendancy early in the 20th century, he suffered for it. The critic Roger Fry disparaged him for pandering to clients who were, admittedly, paying him very well (though Sargent did get his share of dissatisfied customers, prompting him to define the portrait as “a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth”). What I find so wonderful about Sargent’s work (and what drives me to portraiture as a novice artist) is the idea that one can try to render a subject’s best self, a rendering that can not only please the sitter but also deepen the empathetic range and appreciation of the artist. Yes, this involves embellishing surface elements—making the subjects statelier than they may be, improving complexions, softening features that are less than perfect. But such things are incidentals, gateways to a deeper truth. The point is to find a likeness in something more ineffable—something that humanizes and delights. All subjects, no matter how lackluster, have some spark in them, call it soul or life force or simple human potential. It was Sargent’s gift to express this beautifully on canvas.
To paint another person’s face is wonderful: The feeling is akin to falling in love. I prefer to paint someone I already know, and though I will ask that person to sit for one or two sessions, I will then take a photograph so that I can complete the painting alone. Using a digital image on a phone or computer allows me to study the face as a whole while examining specific features, shrinking and enlarging at will in a way made possible only by technology. I want to commune with the sitter, and I sometimes find myself twisting my own face in imitation of my subject’s expression. To mix metaphors, I want to ventriloquize the human image. This may explain why my portraits tend to be flattering. Identifying so closely with my subjects guarantees that I will render them as I would render myself—in the best possible light.
Let me end by stating that this essay is my first extended return to writing since spending a year in my studio. Perhaps I will write more often, but more likely, it will be a sporadic activity. The visual will remain dominant. At this stage of my life, nothing else allows me to drift back in time while also establishing a visceral communion with others in the present.
