The intersection where art and literature meet is an intriguing one. Ken Kesey was a great writer who also painted. Maynard Dixon was an iconic Western painter who also wrote poetry.
Artists like this are rare. Not individuals who decide as a lark they want to try something else. Rather, creators of great talent who are not limited to one expressive medium, but two or more, and do them superbly.
Kesey’s novel ``One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’’ was also a success as a play and a film and helped change mental health laws across the country. But he was also a vibrant painter, witness his exotic ``Jail Journals’’ or a piece seen on this page – a collaboration of Kesey, his son Zane and grandson Caleb – ``The Acid Test.’’ It is psychedelically brilliant.
Dixon’s oils and watercolors defined the early West on the same high level as Remington and Russell, if more mystically. No artist was more empathetic to Native Americans and what he couldn’t say with a brush he said in poetry gathered in ``Rim-Rock and Sage: The Collected Poems of Maynard Dixon.’’ The painting shown here, Shepherd Boy, was a gift to another multi-talented artist – George Herriman, creator of the comic strip Krazy Kat.
William Saroyan won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for drama for ``The Time of Your Life,’’ but he often warmed up before writing plays and short stories by turning out abstract and precisionist watercolors and drawings that had a touch of Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey to them.
Or, some artists, such as Andy Warhol, simply have literary leanings. The butterfly seen here by Warhol was penned inside ``Vanishing Animals,’’ the book he collaborated on with Kurt Benirschke.
Kate Carew was a fine artist as well as a famous journalist and caricaturist of her time, interviewing the likes of Mark Twain, Jack Johnson and Picasso for the old New York World. She was at the root of the celebrity conscious world we see today.
In our gallery, Belle Yang, whose novels ``Baba’’ and ``Odyssey of a Manchurian’’ and a half dozen children’s books have been acclaimed, produces gouaches of Chinese country scenes that verso carry narratives of the imagery, thus combing the two arts of painting and literature on one piece of watercolor paper.
And Michael Katakis, whose photographs such as ``Maya Lin’’ are held by the British Library and the Smithsonian, may be as well known for writing books such as ``Traveller’’ and ``A Thousand Shards of Glass’’
Of course not all writers or painters or photographers should necessarily divide their artistic attention.
Bruce Ariss, for instance, a brilliant painter –see Lower Alvarado Street 1939, a masterpiece of the WPA era – got interested in writing after meeting and becoming a friend of John Steinbeck in Monterey, California. Ariss was an adept writer, but it took him from his more important calling, painting, and he later regretted it.
Of Steinbeck, while it is not known if he ever tried his hand with a brush, he did number numerous artists among his best friends, including James Fitzgerald and Judith Deim. One artist friend – Herb Varnum Poor – was a character witness for Steinbeck when he applied for a New York State gun license in 1941.
Steinbeck also liked his portrait done, and took great interest in the illustrations of his book covers, for instance the Roger Kastel cover for a Viking paperback cover that you can find here for ``East of Eden.’’ Kastel’s work might be its own category: art inspired by literature. Influenced also by Steinbeck’s writing, Warren Chang’s paintings of fieldworkers could also qualify for that arena.
Branching off slightly again, we also like art of literary figures. For instance, we have a Joan Savo of Bob Kaufman, a great poet of the Beat Era, and another, signed Segal, that might be of Jack Kerouac – we’re still researching. Look at the painting, see what you think.
Of course there is one form that naturally combine art and literature, the graphic novel. Yang’s ``Forget Sorrow’’ is a fine graphic novel praised by the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times . . .
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Steve Hauk wrote the award-winning, Jack Lemmon-narrated film documentaries ``The Roots of California Photography – the Monterey Legacy’’ and ``Time Captured in Paintings – the Monterey Legacy.’’ He writes on John Steinbeck for the Steinbeck Review and steinbecknow.com, and is working on a book of short stories on Steinbeck, ``Almost True Stories from a Writer’s Life.’’ His play ``Fortune’s Way,’’ on the impressionist E Charlton Fortune, will be the basis for a documentary-feature film. It and the play The Floating Hat, on the relationship of Impressionist Granville Redmond and Charlie Chaplin, are both carried on the Traditional Fine Arts Organization, Inc. website (tfaoi.com) Two other plays, ``A Mild Concussion,’’ based loosely on the life of computer genius Gary Kildall, and ``Reflections of an American Mossad,’’ have been published on Steinbecknow.com.
