When walls talk...

For the 9000th time in 30 months, I moved house (and states), and spent months swallowed by cardboard and dust and bleak logistics. In our case, moving also meant dealing with fifty framed pieces of art, many by artists who are also friends. For the first month or so in a new home, these massive frames take up precious floor space, leaning in big stacks against exactly the wall you need to get to at any given moment. In this particular house, we have less sunlight in the main living area, and the blank white walls and dingy light and clutter made me into a real grouch. One overcast day, I grabbed my hammer in a fit of gloom and started covering a particular wall from knee to ceiling with art. And then I covered another. And the house started to feel like ours, and the flat walls became mirrors and passageways and stories.

Which, naturally, got me thinking about fiction.

The art that went onto the walls reflected us — our selections, our taste — in the same way that writers often use a character’s objects as a shorthand to personality. The aesthete who loves Mozart. The liberal with her NPR tote bag. And so on.

This art also reflects our histories back to us: the ironic reliquary we got in Cozumel, the artist we met in Portland, the queer art fair we attended our first winter in Minneapolis. The art stands in for our relationships: our close friend, a photographer, whom we met at a dog park in upstate New York and with whom we shared countless cozy, six-hour dinners; the multimedia artist I met at Millay who has become one of my dearest beloveds; our ride-or-die who recently returned to artmaking after a decade of difficulty in love. The pieces themselves tell stories, of course: the print of a masc-femme couple from a 1930s Paris nightclub, cigarettes strewn, faces shiny and exhausted from dancing and champagne, the masc partner’s perfectly manicured fingernails, perhaps a reminder that outside this moment, outside this space, the rules and restrictions of feminine dress still reigned. A reminder of the depth that details create.

The other thing about these framed pieces is that they bounce light. They are simultaneously, physically, themselves and actual mirrors, creating lightness and dimension where flat walls had been. They disrupt the planes. They make space. They defy clean boundaries. 

Here I ask the writerly question: how do I do this in my fictional places? How do I create a richly realized world for my characters (if that is my aim) that is lived in, storied, cluttered, even — without lapsing into the tedium of a gallery catalog? How do I make the fictional world expand outward in a dynamic way that can serve the story I’m telling? In our fictional worlds, there’s a tendency to make objects into symbols rather than allowing the objects themselves to sing, to detail depth. There are so many ways to push against that tendency, if we do that one thing that we’ve been told over and over again is essential for compelling fiction: paying attention. 

Perhaps the aesthete is not simply a fan of Mozart but, you notice, someone who listens exclusively to dirges. Perhaps the Grant Wood print on the wall is interesting not for the dour-faced couple but for the grandiosity of a cathedral-style window superimposed into the Iowa barn (the reason, indeed, that Wood was drawn to the image). Perhaps the clutter of artwork on the characters’ walls is interesting for its interior tension, the mishmash of styles that reflects an uneducated eye or loyalty to artist friends or a cultivated, superficial quirkiness (like a smile that doesn’t reach the eyes...). Maybe it’s the chocolate fingerprint on the original Louise Bourgeois that matters, or the consistent expressions one finds in the portraits on a wall — mid-conversation, slightly disapproving, deeply distracted. Or maybe it’s the character’s deep misunderstanding of the piece that gives it — the art, the misunderstanding, the character, the story — power. 

The Riverview Wine Bar on 42nd St. in Minneapolis (RIP!) had an amazing painting of a group of pears. The pears (if one could say this of pears) were all facing in one direction, with the exception of a single pear facing the assembled crowd. This lone, Norma Rae pear (again, faceless, still a pear) had little feet and really appeared to me to be addressing the other pears, ginning them up for a revolution, a strike, a protest. Exhorting them to demand their due, to claim their rights. Every time I went to that wine bar (not infrequently), I spent some time lost in the story of that painting, the story I created of that painting (for, no matter my wine-swilling companion, only I held that particular story of the piece). It made the space bigger than its walls. And it didn’t have to mean anything — my interpretation reflects back on me, certainly, but the painting didn’t have to symbolize a moment forthcoming in my life, or foretell a narrative arc. It was a window, a passageway, a portal, a mirror — it disturbed the sense that life was only what was happening to my physical self in any given moment. It created dimensionality; it offered up that sense of duality — life as we live it and life as we imagine it — that is the reason so many of us make art, make fiction, to begin with.

Is this just a search for immorality? A cheat that creates such fulsomeness within each lived moment (I am myself and also I am inside the character of this novel who is inside the story of the painting on the wall that is simultaneously reflecting the character back to herself), spins us into such a hall of mirrors, that beginnings and endings no longer have resonance? Boundaries are dismantled. Walls disappear. Life gets more depth in addition to length. Details have consequence; details have crunch. Art as intoxicant. Fiction as life. The more our fiction, our art, reward us for our attention, the more the world will, too.

P.S. If anyone knows what happened to that pear painting, INBOX ME!

From Allison: I’m really in love with this hall of mirrors and how perspective can be reflective–through art, through object, through imagination. A character can consider someone else, considering them. These lines of perspective can draw a three dimensional box, and make a delicious little space for the reader to crawl inside.

Try This: Go buy a piece of art, or find an object and call it art, or make a piece of art. Put it on a wall. How does it change the character of your space? How would it change others’ perception of you, if you were a character?

IMPROMPT2 is a project of writers Erin Kate Ryan and Allison Wyss.