Painting a Picture of Freedom

The likeness of poetry to painting has been noted by such a wide variety of thinkers and artists, from Plato to Ezra Pound, that it seems there must be something essentially true about the analogy. The literary task of description and the pictorial task of composition, share the fundamental aim of revealing something to the viewer. Flannery O’Connor once said that she knew many fiction writers who also painted, “not because they’re any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things. Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things.”