I love working with painters because my stick creatures never really manage to hit the mark. I recall my mother when she was younger knew the artists Sheila Fell, who tragically died quite young, and she used to pick up Sheila’s charcoal and pencil sketches from the floor and hang them on her wall. She once said to her she wished she could draw as she did and Sheila replied that she wished she could write as my mother did.
Artists in differing disciplines lack much of the ego and jealousy that can attend knowing someone in your own field, and appreciation takes over. Trying to view the world from another’s perspective, trying to understand the form and internal structures in their work, trying to understand their understanding of the history of thought in their particular art form. It becomes an expression of life which one can use when one goes back to writing.
In the same fashion when I wrote some lyrics I was interested in the background music someone else wrote for the words and one of the most difficult things I have ever done was to be given two bars of music and asked to write words to go with it. It was trying to mirror the internal music of the words with the music itself.
Marrying art forms is definitely a refined pleasure.