The Synesthesiac Arts and Letters With Ashley Gamell and Maddie Oatman Straight from the Writer's Brush

Author: Ashley Gamell & Maddie Oatman

The coveted wall-space of New York's art museums is usually reserved for die-hard visual artists, those who have starved their way through art school in order to become fluent in the wordless language of shapes and colors. This Fall Break, however, we ran into something a little different at the Anita Shapolski Gallery - the "Writer's Brush," an exhibit of drawings and paintings from some of the most well known writers of the last two centuries. From works by Yeats to Kerouac, Plath to Dillard, the level of artistic competence was as varied as the infamous personalities of the authors involved. This rare intersection of autobiography and imagery was a treat for the literary-minded and left us feeling both aesthetically and intellectually stimulated.

The Shapolski Gallery is on the outskirts of the mainstream New York arts establishment - it's a mom and pop affair, tucked inside the Upper East Side brownstone of an elderly society lady. The exhibit stems from the personal dream of one visionary, and the presentation is fittingly intimate ≠- on the search for a bathroom, we came across the inhabitant's medicine cabinet and toothbrush. The works were compiled by Donald Friedman, a New York trial lawyer, who spent seven years of his off-time collecting work for the book "The Writer's Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers" (Random House). After it came into fruition, he was encouraged to gather some of the original pieces and unveil them in a public exhibition.

We were lucky enough to run into Friedman, a humble, white-haired man with a touch of court charisma, just after he had given a private tour to the national poet-laureate. After stating discretely, "I was just giving a tour to Charles Simic, but I'd honestly rather talk to you guys," Friedman proceeded to give us our own hour-long tour of the collection.

In many cases, the author's drawings were merely extensions of their written works, the visual realm where they played with and colored their ideas. Lawrence Durell painted his sensual heroine "Justine" in bright brush strokes and rendered the lush peach-colored landscapes in which his fantastical novels seem to take place, and A.R. Ammons etched stark compositions of lines and divided circles which look like maps for his patterned, ontological poems. Jorge LuÌs Borges's drawing of a zebra-like fantasy animal harkened back to his whimsical "Book of Magical Creatures," and Victor Hugo's tiny square of a dim landscape was reminiscent of the oppressive settings we imagine in his stark novels.

Certain pieces were exciting because of their unmistakable connection to the personalities of their creators. Tennessee Williams and Jack Kerouac attempted the canvas with mixed results, coming out with endearingly childlike portraits that were nonetheless intriguing evidence of the authors' eccentricities. Williams's "Vision of Paraclete," a portrait of two naked men, had to have been at least partially autobiographical in nature. And Kerouac, author of the breathless and seemingly impulsive novels "On the Road" and "Dharma Bums," featured a disproportionate drawing of a woman's face sketched rapidly with (what else?) wax crayons.

Among the larger works was a portrait of the back of a nude lounging on a bed, painted by Aldous Huxley, writer of the bold utopic novel "A Brave New World." Frustrated by his own deteriorating vision, Huxley often had to paint from memory or touch and sometimes even took acid in order to better see colors. The result is a slightly off-kilter yet emotionally evocative nude portrait of Huxley's wife, complete with brilliant hues and sensuous lines.

Also of note was Louise Gl¸ck's refined, cool-tempered still life of silverware, faint flowers and pears, reflective of her elegant poetic tone. In marked contrast, Charles Bukowski's unruly personality emerged in a loud crayon sketch that looked like the work of an unbalanced five-year-old, a risquÈ drawing of D.H. Lawrence in a water closet and a bronze cast which depicted either a child in tantrum or an over-sexed primate. Other authors couldn't get away from text at all - Mark Strand's modernist canvas of tiny grey lines on a white background looked like a sea of undecipherable words.

The exhibit was short-lived, but the concept survives in Friedman's book, which is chock full of colored prints and juicy details about the writers and their closet careers as visual artists.