The Visual Turn

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.