When we think of creative people, we are often swift to assign them into a category: Irish Murdoch is a writer, Vincent Van Gogh a painter, and Virginia Woolf, though friends with artists, to be remembered as an author first. And yet, in light of the recent discovery of over 80 paintings and drawings belonging to Murdoch in an Oxford attic, it is worth reminding ourselves how infrequently a person’s creativity is tied to one medium alone.
The collection discovered by Miles Leeson, himself a scholar of Dame Murdoch, includes the only self-portrait she is known to have painted, several female nudes, and many surrealist landscape paintings. Created during Murdoch’s time as an undergraduate at Somerville College in the midst of the Second World War, the works reflect many of the motifs that would later reappear in her literary endeavours: the strangeness of modern life, despair, anxiety, and, most notably, female sexuality.
Given that the same attic contained almost 600 unpublished poems, many centering on Murdoch’s exploration of her own bisexuality, the discovery of her paintings presents us with a beautiful insight into how she came to conceive of herself as a young woman. Our capacity for interpretation, therefore, of the many moments where art moves her characters is only deepened. The spiritual ecstasy and clarity experienced by the character of Dora Greenfield while looking at masterworks in the National Gallery in Murdoch’s 1958 novel The Bell is perhaps less fictive than we once imagined.
In her 1934 essay “Walter Sickert: A Conversation”, Virginia Woolf offered the eponymous artist the highest compliment an author as talented as herself could make: “Words are an impure medium; far better to have been born into the silent kingdom of paint”. Perhaps, then, it is in this “silent kingdom” that Murdoch too was able to find the clarity of mind that words had not yet enabled her.
Whether Woolf herself was ever able to access this realm she clearly idolised is more difficult to say. Despite being surrounded by successful artists – notably her sister Vanessa Bell—in the Bloomsbury Group, the author had a renowned aversion to those who wished to capture her in either paint or photographs. The portraits that exist of her are fleeting, full of dynamic brushstrokes that seem to mimic the restless energy of an unwilling sitter.
And yet, she was clearly interested in the artistic impulses that drove her friends. In her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, she offers one of her most profound character studies through Lily Briscoe; a young, single female artist. Lily spends the novel’s entire ten year span working on an abstract portrait of the novel’s matriarch, Mrs Ramsay, and her completion of it marks the novel’s emotional culmination. Through Lily, Woolf was able to wear the skin of a painter, emulating those qualities that she had identified in her sister and following them into fruition. Thus, if she did not herself participate in making art, it clearly offered a form of catharsis that she envied in others.
Woolf asks of novelists how they can “convey in words the mixture of innocence and sordidity, pity and squalor?” The painter need only take “his brush and paint a tender green light on the faded wallpaper. Light is beautiful falling through green leaves. He has no need of explanation; green is enough.” But does language not often come close to painting? If we think of Mrs Dalloway, told over the span of a day through the many scenes of London, is each not a pointillist or even impressionist painting built through the layers upon layers of rich imagery and details? I would argue that the scenes created upon such pages are as bright as any material artwork.
But I am sounding a little too much like a Symbolist. We must remember, of course, that the bright Provencal fields and cypresses expressed in the colours traditionally associated with joy belonged to the same man who was suffering depressive psychosis in a French asylum. Revealed through his letters to his brother Theo, Van Gogh’s self-expressions through words pose a powerful juxtaposition to the beauty and peace of his material artworks.
Perhaps, then, we would do well to hold literature and art not as twin mouthpieces endowed with the same purposes, but rather to consider that each method may offer the person its own independent creative lexicon entirely. If, after all, for those as skilled with words as Woolf and Murdoch, there were realms beyond their reach with the pen, and for Van Gogh beyond the brush, it is probably best that even we mere mortals resist the urge to pigeonhole ourselves within one medium of creativity alone, lest we miss our calling entirely.
“virginia woolf” by miss_rogue is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
