223 - The Painting

 

Welcome to the first Wordsmith Creative Writing Tutorial of February 2021!

223. Write a short narrative from the POV of a canvas/painting. How does it feel about becoming art? How does it feel about the artist and his process?

Starter – Characterising the Inanimate

You have come across simile and metaphor at school, which is the use of comparison to describe nouns, and you have probably come across extended metaphor. This is where you continue a theme of comparison over a few lines or paragraphs.

Now, often taught alongside simile and metaphor is personification – The sun was smiling, or the storm raged, for example – which is a technique to give human attributes to non-human objects. Characterising – that is, making a character out of an inanimate object – is essentially an extended personification, which is what this prompt is asking us to do.

So, for our starter task we should really explore how we can characterise inanimate objects. Firstly, we should think about what a character needs – now this goes for inanimate or living creatures.

I like to think in questions to create a character profile.

1.       Intention – What does it want?

2.      Emotion – How does it feel about its life?

3.      Personality – How does its shape/use/appearance affect its behaviour?

4.      Voice – How does it sound?

I have picked my piggy bank, and this is his profile;

Intention – He wants to be filled with quality coins, not just copper and silver.

Emotion – He is full, but unsatisfied. His bung is only just hanging on, but the weight he is carrying is unworthy – lowly.

Personality – The flag on his back makes him feel ambitious and driven to be great. He has big ideas but feels trapped in his place.

Voice – His voice is big and pompous, like a politician.

I hope that you can see where I’ve taken the physical characteristics of this object and created the beginnings of a character. You can pick an object from the video, or one of your own and create a character profile for it, based on intention, emotion, personality and voice. Try a couple if you like. Take 5 minutes.

I tried another... a fountain pen...

Intention - To write the great novel, but his owner only uses him to complain about life in his journal.

Emotion - Disappointed at the quality of words and the spiky handwriting. Frustrated.

Personality - Deliberately rebellious, randomly holding back ink to stop the writer's inane flow of ridiculous words.

Voice - A plaintive, but angry whisper, hoarse with screaming.

I find these quite interesting. Characterising inanimate objects can be difficult, but you might find it handy to try the 4-question technique in your head to give a voice to objects in your life. Writing from the POV of an object can give you an interesting insight to the world around you.

Building Ideas - What’s in a Painting?

So, hopefully you’ve been able to see how you can create a character for an inanimate object and now we need to build a profile for a painting. On the video I provided some details about well-known paintings and their artists - or you can Google your favourite artist and pick a picture of your own, but don’t waste time on detailed research. You just need an idea of the artist's style and life, don't write an essay!

You can also add other details about art and artists that you may have picked up - this kind of basic knowledge is useful for adding a depth of ideas to your work. For example, I know something about oil painting that is interesting. Oil paints often take weeks to dry, and when modern scientists have taken X-rays of old masters they can see where half-finished work has been scraped off. This idea of a scraped canvas waiting to become something is the seed of an idea I like, so here is my profile;

Nighthawks – Edward Hopper (American Realist – Oil Paint)

Intention – To be. To be completed and to know what it is.

Emotion – Desperation to have an identity. Aspiration to satisfy the artist.

Personality – Eager to please, like a patient needing various painful surgeries to be healed.

Voice – Pleading, quiet and hopeful.

Now, you should also be adding more detail to your profile, because the task asks for the answer to a couple of questions to be included in your writing.

1. -        How does the canvas or painting feel about being art?
2. -        How does it feel about its artist or his process?

So take a good 10 or 15 minutes to research, look at your painting and think about its character, then answer these two questions for yourself.

223. Write a short narrative from the POV of a canvas/painting. How does it feel about becoming art? How does it feel about the artist and his process?

By now, you have a good foundation to create this narrative piece, but we should focus on planning to make sure that you can really do this one justice. This is a planning technique that you can use to quickly get your thoughts in order, and it starts with a simple grid.

Who? Character/s	Where? Location
What? What do the characters want?	But… The problem
Details and Vocabulary Choices

 

With this grid you can break down narrative ideas into key points quite quickly. You can then add on details and interesting vocabulary that you could use. This is my planning grid for this task.

Who? -         The canvas, recently scraped -         The artist	Where? -         The studio, quite dark and smoky, a basement space
What? -         The canvas wants to be completed, to know what it is. -         The artist is crafting his image	But… -         The artist is a perfectionist who takes a long time to find satisfaction in his work.
Details and Vocabulary Colours - Lamp Black, Prussian Blue, Ochre and White Painting - Brush stroke, scribble, layer, draw, blend, mixing, muddling Synonyms - Scraped, cleaned, flayed, bare, empty.

 Take 5 minutes to draw your own table before you plan out your paragraphs, you should write 4-5 for this task. Remember it’s a narrative, so it needs a beginning, middle and end and shouldn’t be all description. Try and pick out a few details from the painting so that it is clear what the painting is. This task needs a little more focus than I usually ask for, so I think you should take AT LEAST 5 minutes to plan before you write, and you should be writing for around 20 minutes.

Challenge

This prompt is a challenge in itself, so I'm not adding technical difficulty here, instead I'm giving you a list of words. They all fit in the general theme of an object and its desires so it should be relatively easy to use them all in your writing piece.

• Destiny
• Emptiness
• Meaning
• Purpose
• Useful/Usefulness

REFLECTION

I expect that some of you found that quite a slog, this kind of POV writing can be very difficult because you have to invent the whole character from scratch, but it does offer a certain freedom in that way as well.

My Reflection questions this time are,

-         I like/dislike the character of this painting, because…

-         One part I like is… because…

-         One thing I struggled with was… so next time I will…

My Work - Nighthawks

Balanced over the trash can, he scrapes the pigment and oil from my face, peeling away my identity, my meaning. How can I be anything if he cannot decide on what I should be? This is the third time I’ve been scraped clean of half a dream. I feel flayed and naked, even with the scraps of old ideas still staining my surface. He grunts and finishes bearing my fibres before he leans me up against the studio wall. He lights up a cheroot and moves on to another, the days we spent together in composition forgotten like another empty affair. I’m left alone, seared and raw like a burn.

            When my surface is eventually dry, he takes me from the stack of forlorn and flayed former subjects and clamps my frame into the easel. With a few lazy strokes he fills my muddled emptiness with dark shades of lamp black and Prussian blue. He stares at sketchbooks with a manic purpose, lighting cheroot after cheroot, filling the air with yellow smoke and the scent of bourbon. After the dark shades he begins to work in light, stark chalky white, flashes of ochre gold. Faces appear with the twist of bristles, staring out. With final furious touches he scrapes and scribbles blocks of colour over colour, adding shades and blending.

For a time he looks at me, never raising his brush. Smoking with intense eyes, evaluating my usefulness, deciding whether my destiny lies with the scraper and the trashcan again. I wait.

            Days pass as he lets the paint dry, occasionally lifting a brush, filling the bristles with colour, then washing them clean again in a jar of turps. It is more painful, this tension, this wondering, hoping to be what I am, to hold all that he has made of me.

He unscrews the clamps and carries me across the room. Not again.

I float past the trash can, relief lightening my mind as he reaches for a pen and flips me onto my face, ready to give me a name. I have made it past his scrutiny. I am Nighthawks.

 Extension Task - Empty Your Pockets

Pick a character - TV, Film or Book - and pick three items that they would carry in their pocket/handbag etc. Create a profile for each item -how do they feel about their owner? Write 1-2 paragraphs from each item describing their owner.

Terminology Check

Do you know these words? Look them up if you don't and try to use them correctly in your work.

Inanimate

Simile

Metaphor

Personification

Attributes

Bung

Lowly

Ambitious

Pompous

Inane

Hoarse

Aspiration

Pigment

Flayed

Composition

Scrutiny