A Matter of Perspective
By Peter Selgin
Childhood drawing from Peter Selgin.
As I boy, I fell in love with perspective. When we were kids, our father would take my twin brother George and me hiking along the beds of abandoned railroads. Our explorations took us through quaint-named places like Hawleyville Junction, Steeprock, Washington Depot, Cornwall Bridge … across Lake Lillinonah and along the Housatonic River. Papa carried a geological survey map on which to chart the ghost railroad’s journey. Our 6-year-old legs had to run to match his grown-up strides, lured onward by the promise of a rusting locomotive—complete with smokestack and cowcatcher—that, Papa promised, was “just around the next bend.” To our perpetual dismay, it never materialized.
That elusive locomotive existed less “around the next bend” than at an equally tantalizing spot known as the “vanishing point,” where all lines of perspective converged; I was taught that by Jon Gnagy on his Saturday morning TV show Learn to Draw. In half-hour segments broadcast from the top of the Empire State Building, using the charcoal pencils and sticks sold in kit boxes advertised on the same program, Gnagy taught me and thousands of other kids how to draw a ship at dock, a covered bridge, a log cabin in winter.
When he drew a set of receding railroad tracks and described the “vanishing point,” Gnagy first awakened my love of perspective. From that moment on, orthogonals pursued me and vice versa. By age 8, I had mastered the art of perspective. Ten years later, my decision to attend art school surprised no one, least of all me.
“Just as Brunelleschi’s experiment changed the course of art history, perspective determined the course of my life.”
The concept of linear perspective—that objects appear smaller as they grow more distant—comes to us straight from Euclid. Roughly 1,700 years later in the 15th century, an architect and engineer named Brunelleschi applied Euclid’s theorems to the problem of representing three-dimensional space in painting. Conducted in the baptistry of the duomo in Florence using a drawing surface with a hole in it and a mirror, Brunelleschi’s experiment changed the way pictures are not only painted but viewed. It changed how people saw the world.
Just as Brunelleschi’s experiment changed the course of art history, perspective determined the course of my life.
One afternoon in my second year at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, my advanced painting instructor stepped up behind me at my easel. He watched for a few moments before saying, in a weary Brooklyn accent, “You know what you ah, Selgin? You’re an ahhtistic illiterate.” Then he walked away, shaking his head.
The instructor, a painter named Blaustein who’d won two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Rome Prize, felt that I was after glib results, painting “pretty pictures” with little depth and less ambition, leaning on my technical skills, unwilling to struggle for my art. And though I pretended to shrug off his appraisal, I knew Blaustein was right.
After swaggering out of the painting studio, in a desultory mood, I returned to the room I rented in a retired church choir conductor’s apartment. I switched on my black-and-white portable TV, flopped down on the mattress I’d dragged in off the street, and watched Richard Burton’s face fill the screen, his Welsh baritone intoning the words “… bergin ... bergin and water” as the camera drew ominously closer. Mesmerized, I watched the rest of Mike Nichol’s screen adaptation of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
“I spent the next year hitchhiking across the country, carrying my sketchbook, filling its blank pages with words. I forbid myself from drawing.”
The next day in the Pratt library I read the play. Halfway through it was the monologue that had so mesmerized me: a block of words. As I turned the last page, my mind was made up: I’d plumb my artistic depths with words, not paint. I’d be a writer.
In figure drawing class two days later, while my fellow students drew the nude model, I used my charcoal pencil to fill page after page of my newsprint pad with dialogue. I was writing a play, my first, angling for my own mesmerizing monologue. Meanwhile our instructor, Jimmy Grashow, walked from student to student, giving feedback. Like Blaustein, Grashow, too, had grown disillusioned with me. “Selgin, what are you doing?” he asked.
“Writing a play,” I explained.
With his thumb Grashow pointed to the door. “That’s it, man. Get out. I’ll give you a B. Just get the hell out of here!”
When the semester ended, I left Pratt. Thinking it was what writers did, I spent the next year hitchhiking across the country, carrying my sketchbook, filling its blank pages with words. I forbid myself from drawing. I was a writer.
So was born a schism that would endure for the next 40 years.
Two years after leaving Pratt, having earned a BA in English, I returned to New York City. By then I’d written two novels. While working in a copy shop on West 48th Street, I drew caricatures of the customers to pass the time. One insisted that I was squandering a bankable talent. To prove it, he hired me to do caricatures at a friend’s wedding. Soon I was earning a living as a caricaturist, doing corporate events, weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs.
While doing caricatures at a bar mitzvah one evening, a white-haired elderly man with a pronounced stoop said to me while sitting for his portrait, “No, seriously, kid, what do you really do?”
“I’m a writer,” I responded.
“Yeah? What sort of writing?”
“I’m working on a novel,” I said. In fact, it was my third, the first two having met with rejection.
The man shook his head ponderously. I felt him weigh his next words. “I was a writer once,” he finally admitted, then fell silent again. I finished his caricature and showed it to him. His reaction betrayed nothing. Standing up to leave, twisting his scrolled caricature in his fists as if wringing a towel, he offered hard-earned advice before walking off: “Do yourself a favor, kid. Quit while you’re ahead. There’s nothing but heartache and misery in it.”
For the next ten years I earned my living as an illustrator. Still, I saw myself not as a visual artist who wrote on the side, but as a struggling author supporting himself through his visual art. So intent was I on my writing, so obsessed with authorial ambition, I belittled my first love. I saw it as a way to pay the bills at best, at worst an impediment to my true calling. It never occurred to me that my words and pictures could join forces. I saw them as rivals competing with each other, the way my twin brother George and I competed in sports and for girls while growing up.
In the mid-‘90s, two things happened that again changed my relationship to visual art. While in Philadelphia drawing caricatures at a convention, I wandered into an antique shop where I saw a painting of the Titanic rearing up in silhouette against a huge iceberg with mother-of-pearl highlights. Two things struck me about the painting: its naiveté and the fact that it was painted on, or behind, a sheet of glass. It was a reverse painting—or, in French, verre églomisé.
By then I was married. My wife and I had just bought our first home, a pre-war apartment on the Upper West Side with a sunken living room. I pictured the painting hanging over the deco bar unit we’d installed in the raised dining alcove.
The antique dealer wanted $900 for the painting: too rich for my blood. So I left it there. But the painting wouldn’t leave me. It haunted me. It captured perfectly my boyhood fascination with ships and the Titanic. More intriguing still was its flouting of the conventions of “realistic” painting. Colors, proportions, perspective: all were wrong. And yet, somehow, they added up to something very right. From memory I tried to recreate it. In the process, I experienced a freedom and joy I’d never experienced before as a visual artist, that of doing things incorrectly. But what delighted me more than anything was abandoning the perspective I’d fallen in love with as a kid watching Jon Gnagy, and to which, until then, without my knowing it, my art had been bound and shackled.
“I experienced a freedom and joy I’d never experienced before as a visual artist, that of doing things incorrectly.”
For the first time since Blaustein’s class, I began painting again for pleasure. I applied my new naive style to my illustrations, one of which appeared in The New Yorker. Soon after, the editor of a children’s book imprint at Simon & Schuster called. She’d seen the illustration and wanted to know if I’d ever thought of doing a children’s book.
“Sure, I think of it all the time,” I lied.
We arranged to meet at her office. Meanwhile, I jotted down some ideas. At last I arrived at a spoof of the Titanic story, a tall-tale minus the tragedy, with a moral guaranteed to appeal to small people: the story of the world’s biggest ocean liner (“so big it can travel around the world without moving”) and how a little fellow name Pip Squeak saves it, almost.
The idea landed. The book was published. For the first time my words and my pictures joined forces.
Despite this happy confluence of fortune, I still thought of myself as a writer first, determined to keep my shady side gig in the shadows. In 2009, after teaching a few creative writing classes and enjoyed the experience, MFA in hand, I left New York again, this time to pursue a full-time academic career.
By then I’d published a short story collection and a novel, but I was still far from the literary success I dreamed of. As an academic, I’d have summers off and paid sabbaticals: time to write, time to dedicate myself exclusively to words. I gave away my easel and my drafting table (the Salvation Army refused to take them, they were so encrusted with paint). The rest of my art supplies—my paints, brushes, canvasses, drawings and paintings—all went into storage. There would be no more painting, no more drawing, no more illustrating, no more dividing myself between words and pictures.
The next four years served up a series of visiting posts away from New York, before eventually landing a permanent, full-time university post. I enjoyed teaching, won a few prestigious literary awards, published more books that were well received, could even claim something of a reputation as a writer. Still, part of me wasn’t satisfied. I felt an emptiness, a feeling that at times delivered me to the edge of despair and beyond.
Unlike linear perspective, psychological perspective is as much a factor of time as of distance. Though psychological perspective also affects and is affected by the angle of perception, and though the cubists and other artists discovered bold new ways to incorporate time into visual art, psychological perspective is mainly the domain of writers, who call it point of view. Like perspective, it changes how we see the world and ourselves in it.
So I told my students in a seminar I titled “A Matter of Perspective,” in which I drew an analogy between narrative writing and visual art. For one assignment I had my students find a painting that, in style if not in subject, most closely captured the spirit of something they had written. To their chagrinned astonishment, some found that their stories had more in common with Norman Rockwell than with Pollock or Picasso. As time went by, more and more I found myself resorting to visual metaphors in my classes, talking about painters and paintings.
Five years after starting my university job, now tenured, I sold my New York apartment and bought the house I still live in, a lakeside A-frame 20 minutes from campus. Having moldered away for nearly a decade in a Bronx storage facility, my art supplies joined me here, along with dozens of canvasses and portfolios stuffed with drawings and illustrations.
“I knew then that segregating the visual artist in me from the writer had been a mistake…they were not in opposition; they needed each other.”
In one of those portfolios I found a drawing I’d done as a child. Rendered painstakingly in pencil on construction paper turned brown by time, it shows a locomotive, the one my father promised us during those railroad hikes, the one that was always just around the next bend. Behind it, the tracks form an inverted “V” as they recede toward the horizon. As I paged through more drawings, dozens of them, I was deeply moved by these long-forgotten images and the dedication a much younger version of me had given them. Here were the fruits of that neglect, reeking of mildew, yellowed with age. Seeing them was like being reunited with a long-lost twin—not my brother, George, but myself.
I knew then that segregating the visual artist in me from the writer had been a mistake. Too long seen as opposing ideas, my love of shapes, colors, and lines, and my love of words and the meanings and stories conveyed by them belonged together; they were not in opposition; they needed each other.
Three years ago, I turned part of my basement into an art studio, complete with drafting table and easel. On weekends, during summer, winter, and other breaks from teaching and writing, whenever I can, I draw and paint down there, spending quality time on the other side of my brain. And while I used to think drawing and painting took time away from my writing, now I know they do the opposite: They make me a better writer.
Visual art and writing are different disciplines requiring different skills, different sensibilities. Yet as in any good relationship, those sensibilities needn’t conflict. Like the two rails forming a set of train tracks, they can balance, inform, and inspire each other, always together if never converging, united only by perspective, which joins them at the vanishing point. And though the two rails may never meet, like that illusive locomotive, I need both to keep going.
Peter Selgin’s Drowning Lessons won the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, GA, Selgin has written a novel, three books on the writer’s craft, two essay collections and The Inventors, a memoir.