I had a great time joining Janet Kvammen on March 22nd for the Poetry and Art Salon in Anvil Center. I talked about the bridge between poetry and painting and how they are the two sides of the same coin.
I explored this bridge more explicitly with my latest collection “Hedglore: Thirteen versus”, my series of 13 oil paintings inspired by the album folklore by Taylor Swift. Each painting is inspired by a single lyric in one of the songs.
great poem paints a picture in your mind, and a great painting reads like a poem you can’t quite get out of your head.
With this collection, I wanted to physically bridge that gap. When I was listening to the narratives of Folklore, my goal became to figure out how to take a single lyric and anchor it into something tangible using paint.
Translating poetry into visual art is like acting as an interpreter between two different realms. A poet uses a specific metaphor or a turn of phrase to describe a feeling of isolation or longing. As a painter, my job was to figure out how to use composition, light, and atmosphere to visually represent that same feeling without losing its lyrical soul.”
Instead of just illustrating a literal scene from a song, I wanted to capture the emotional weight of the words. The thirteen pieces in this collection are my visual translations of lyrical stanzas. It was about taking the invisible threads of these stories—the escapism, the mysticism, the heartbreak—and making them something you can physically stand in front of.
Ultimately, I believe that whether we are writing a stanza or mixing paint, we are all just trying to capture the human experience and give it back to the world in a way that makes someone else feel understood.
