A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words

The enigmatic silence of the canvas must compete with the noise of interpretation.

Shanti Dave, Untitled, Encaustic and oil on canvas, circa 1980s

J. Swaminathan’s imagined landscapes stem from a known reality but depict a world which has a self-contained logic intelligible to the artist alone. We see compositions of floating mountains, trees, and birds suspended on vivid, flat backgrounds that are enigmatic, oddly serene. Swaminathan wrote extensive manifestos expounding on, among other things, his paintings and his thought processes. Was it necessary for him to explain in words what he had painted on canvas? Why do we try to understand art – a visual language – through words, which are not? This is a concern that plagues all the arts – visual, musical, performative, and even architecture – the queen of all arts. Existing for a moment in a completely non-verbal realm would be akin to Rabindranath Tagore’s statement, “The world speaks to me in colours, my soul answers in music.” The fact remains that words are the primary mode of communication for the majority of people, though they often fall short of the human capacity for imagination and creation. Perhaps that explains why the adage “A picture speaks a thousand words” was coined. 

Robert Indiana, Love, 1970 onwards

Picture books for children bring the word and image together, each adding value to make the whole more than the sum of its parts. The words, small and few for beginning readers, enhance thoughts and ideas conveyed by the art. The adage becomes less apt in the case of illustrated manuscripts, where the art at some level, is in service to the word. The gravity of the words in the first illustrated version of the Constitution of India, for example, far outweigh the artwork by Santiniketan artist Nandalal Bose and his team, no matter how worthy their art and its intent may be in its own right. But illustrations for texts are not the focus of today’s article.

Trying to communicate ideas and feelings without words is the artist’s constant challenge. American Realist Edward Hopper said, “If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” In his essay titled What is Art? Leo Tolstoy wrote, “…by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms…to transmit that feeling [evoked in oneself] so others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.” It is this transmission that forms the crux of the artist’s dilemma. Of her luminous flower paintings, Georgia O’Keeffe echoed Hopper, saying, “I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.”

There are books and essays, columns and articles, exhibition and auction catalogues full of words on art by historians, critics, scholars, and journalists. A single work of art, such as the Bodhisattva Padmapani in Ajanta cave 1, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Hiroshi Yoshida’s Fuji from Kawaguchi Lake, or Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, can spawn an entire thesis – or two – or a hundred. The sheer volume of writing is testament to the power of the image. Of course, this in-between medium of translation from artist to reader/viewer is necessary, but much is inevitably lost in translation, and it is important to be cognisant of this dilution – some might say, infusion. Much like the act of reading fiction, in which the characters belong to each reader in a completely unique way that is not accessible to anyone else, taking in a work of art first-hand without the distraction or intervention of third-party explanation and interpretation makes it a singular experience. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, wrote, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.”

Many visual artists shun the separation between text and image, creating art that incorporates words, though they are generally less than a thousand. (When more are needed, artists write manifestos!) Calligraphy, in which the script itself is an ornamented image, has long been an art form around the world. American artist Ed Ruscha has worked with language in the built environment since the 1960s. Early Indian modernist KCS Paniker was so interested in the power of symbols and words that he scribbled tiny, often undecipherable notes in parts of some of his paintings. Many of Shanti Dave’s canvases include an enigmatic script in bas relief that at first glance seems recognisable, and upon closer inspection turns out to be completely made up by the artist.

Innumerable contemporary artists around the world incorporate alphabets, words, scripts, symbols, and fonts into their multi-media practices. Graffiti art, born from the painted word, is a genre in itself. Shilpa Gupta’s illuminated installations are often phrases constructed of lights hung on scaffolding or a wall. Robert Indiana’s serif typeface Love sculptures can be found in cities around the globe. The distinction between text and art blurs in these instances when the artist is presenting the words themselves as images to be pondered upon. If the word is the picture, does it then limit its own capacity to be interpreted in more than a thousand ways? Or is the artist communicating directly with the viewer by removing the need for an intermediary medium of translation?

The irony of writing today’s column is not lost on this author.

(Meera is an architect, author, editor, and artist.)