Paint. Write. See.

My mother and my grandfather were both painters, she in oil, he in watercolor. I grew up surrounded by their art. I watched my mother at her easel. (I was once her unhappy model.) But until a few days ago, standing in front of a painting at the Stradt der Frauen exhibit, I never thought about a particular similarity between the work of a painter and the work of a writer.

I don’t mean the obvious similarities: the canvas/ the page; the paint/ the words. I mean something about the way the work is done, the purposeful nearsightedness and farsightedness of the work.

Let me explain. I was walking through one of the rooms in the exhibit and found myself skirting a small group of people clustered around a painting, The Dreamers, by Helene Funke. She was one of the more than dozen forgotten or overlooked women painters of the early 20th century being rediscovered and celebrated in this exhibition.

Historical aside: “Forgotten” and “rediscovered” are loaded words here. She was actually quite well known in French circles before the first World War and established a reputation in Vienna, despite hostile criticism coming from the male-dominated cultural scene. After the 1938 Anschluss (the German/Nazi take-over of Austria), modern art was banished and her work, as well as the work of many others, disappeared. It was not until 2007 that she was rediscovered.

Okay, back to the lower Belvedere and the exhibit. In skirting the group, I found myself just inches away from the canvas. This is not how I look at art. From a nose away, it is all brush stroke and palette knife, thickness and featheriness, color laid on color. It is not art. It is craft. It is the work itself. The detail. You see how the sausage was made. You have to stand back to see the sausage itself.

How like writing, I thought. The nose-away detail of word choice and punctuation, the specific construction of the sentence, where the paragraph breaks. The writer works with her tools, up close, just as the painter does. Then, from a distance, the reader encounters the work and sees the art.

Okay, enough of the High Culture stuff. It’s time to walk to the Spar and hunt for some Spargelcremesuppe. You’d have to have read last week’s blog for that to make sense.