In the Company of 25 Writers: an introduction Rachel Robertson
Mark Rothko famously said, ‘A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer,’ before going on to note the riskiness of sharing art, for a picture ‘dies by the same token’. As writers, we understand both that risk and that companionship. With the publication of 25 for 25, we celebrate the expansion, pleasure, and enlivening inspiration that visual art offers us, as viewers and as creators. There is a long tradition of ekphrastic writing, a term often used to describe the summoning through words of a visual scene or artwork. Traditionally, for writers, ekphrasis is an exchange between the seen and the written: the experience of a perceived visual object is transcribed into a written account, with special attention paid to the idea that the reader ‘re-experiences’ the original sensory encounter. The creative writing in this collection, however, is less focused on attempting to revive an original encounter. Instead, we use the artworks as a springboard or imaginative prompt, allowing ourselves to travel through time and space, memory and invention, to write a work that bounces from the visual art experience.
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