A Painter's Novel:
By using a confluence of mediums I want to protract and deepen what would otherwise be, a standard artist's portrait. A series of tightly rendered black and white drawings will appear alongside the written narrative to reflect the stylistic tone of the novel. The visual component helps to complete the literary portrait, further illuminating a world in which wealth, poverty, sexual attraction, youth and old age collide. In experimental terms, my fiction serves as a map for my visual work.
Artists and Authors:
'Northeast' takes inspiration from court painters like Goya and Sargent. The critical and humorous society novels by Nancy Mitford and Edith Wharton, and the experimental portrait 'Against Nature' by Joris-Karl Huysmans, have influenced the writing. Alex Katz and Fairfield Porter's expressive regional style (portraits of friends in and around New England) have been in my peripheral vision. Line drawings made by Sylvia Plath -- exhibited for the first time at the Mayor Gallery in London fall 2011-- bear resemblance to these, though she never combined her visual art with her writing.
