Writer-Artist Five: Annie Proulx

“It is a kind of pleasurable note-taking.” ~ Annie Proulx

The Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Pen-Faulkner Award, and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction-winning novelist, short story writer, and journalist, most famous for The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx is also a painter, using her artistic skills to record what she sees.

When I asked her whether I was correct to infer from the writing on her pictures that she used her art as a memory aid, she wrote back:

“In part, it is an aide de memoire to fill out details of landform, as the longer you look at a particular scene the more connections between what you are looking at and the natural world you have looked at a thousand times before. But also, it is a kind of pleasurable note-taking.

My mother was a painter, one of her sisters was a painter, there were artists in the family generations back. I and my sisters grew up in a household where pencil, brush, paints, were always at hand and we were encouraged to draw. So it is/was a familiar sort of thing to do, especially when sitting in airports waiting for flights.”

For more, visit the Simon and Schuster page here and, of course, check out The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers for more than 400 plates of artwork by great writers and the stories behind them.

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