Tiger: Hello, everyone! I'm happy to be introducing this guest post on art/inspiration from Jay Province, author of The Summer Set. Take a look at the book synopsis, then check out his awesome thoughts on Hemingway and on the inspiration provided by art!
"In the summer of 1956 two teenagers rescue a drowning woman from the Susquehanna�s turbulent waters, and their predictable lives suddenly veer towards a deadly detour. Shadowy men in black cars start tracking their every movement. A tall foreboding man clutching a snake-headed staff and chain-smoking through a hole in his throat seeks their names.
Fourteen year-old catcher Peter 'Chumbucket' Miller and his best friend pitcher Mike DeSorcier begin the summer on a mission to capture the World Series championship of their youth baseball league. Spying on a league meeting from a sweltering attic perch they uncover a group of extra-dimensional beings infiltrating the league. During their breathless escape, the boys discover two things: they are in mountains of trouble and they need help. Assistance (and more trouble) arrives in the form of two daring and mystifying girls � the unusual Karen Croft and the beautiful Jo Munro. Together, the teens must solve the mystery of the Noqumiut before a fateful August lunar eclipse.
Bizarre and comical events trail the foursome�s investigation: Santa and his merry elf magically appear in June running for their lives from a town hall fire; a teen girl flies her Cessna from the scene of a refinery explosion; and a dead body is left as a present on a leather couch � carefully wrapped in a mink coat and holding a red gift bow.
Unlikely sources aid their efforts. These include an Eskimo shaman, a magic stone carving of a lively seal, a ferociously loyal dog, and an opponent from Roswell, New Mexico whose talents (and origins) may literally be out of this world.
The Summer Set is a humorous, intense, action-packed story about friends, enemies and the pursuit of winning it all. The novel is for all story lovers ages twelve and up."
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Art as Inspiration for Style
Most readers easily recognize Ernest Hemingway�s famous economy of prose. The influences upon his writing style have been hotly debated over the past sixty years. Hemingway�s stint as a newspaper reporter is often cited as his primary style influence. He acknowledged the reporter�s lessons of using active verbs, short sentences, and precise word selection in his writing. Lesser known is the fact that his studies of turn-of-the-century artists, and their paring brushstrokes, challenged and changed his writing.
In his hungry days, Hemingway would amble through the Luxembourg Museum to study the works of Paul Cezanne. Hemingway was a great admirer of Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris. In Gertrude Stein�s salon he absorbed their paintings firsthand. Finishing �Big Two-Hearted River� Hemingway wrote with excitement to Stein: �"I�m trying to do the country like Cezanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit."
Let�s take a look at a representative Cezanne and a Gris. We�ll contrast their works with a bit of Hemingway�s prose from �Big Two-Hearted River�:
Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log spires of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions again by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.
My interest in this essay is not to convince its reader of anything. I do not argue. I simply ask the reader to look at the painting thumbnails and try to see the lines, perspectives, and colors in the paintings and then find the congruence between the paintings and the prose. I do not suggest that Hemingway was looking at these particular paintings while writing his short-story. Rather, the suggestion is to see the similarities in style: blocks of images set hard against each other, clear statements of color and form, the movement among the static forms. Look for the �changing positions� and the �quick angles� that Nick observes from the bridge. Can you see Hemingway drawing from his studies of Cezanne and Gris in his word sketch of the bridge and trout?
The congruence lies in the fact that all great art speaks to the unconscious in images, just as dreams do. Whether an artist creates using words or pigments or sound vibrations is immaterial to the fact that an artist creates through the use of images. Look at this Winslow Homer trout:
In summation, inspiration for both content and style may be found anywhere in the natural world and in the worlds of art � be they painting, literature, music, fashion, or pop-culture. Andy Warhol found beauty in a soup can. Inspiration for your writing material and style can be found anywhere your mind seizes upon it.
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Tiger: Thanks so much for the great discussion of art-inspiration, Jay! You've made me want to go back and re-read Hemingway, as well as scour the internet for some new artistic inspiration.
Readers, you can find Jay's book, The Summer Set, HERE at Amazon.com.
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Tiger: Thanks so much for the great discussion of art-inspiration, Jay! You've made me want to go back and re-read Hemingway, as well as scour the internet for some new artistic inspiration.
Guest Post: "Art as Inspiration for Style" by Jay Province Link Free Download
