Ekphrasis: When Great Art Inspires Great Text (or Comics)

Thanks to Chad Greene for giving Citric Acid permission to reprint this essay which, along with his original art and poem, originally appeared at Harrison Middleton University's blog.

I was a professor, and it was the week before the semester ended, so I should have been grading. But instead of colored pens and stacks of students’ essays, on my desk were a piece of cardboard, a permanent marker, and a set of acrylic paints and brushes. After a visit to the exceptional exhibition “Peter Carr: Artist for Survival” at the Cerritos College Art Gallery, I found myself making my first attempt at ekphrasis – a verbal inspired by a visual.

It had started out as a poem, emerging from notes scribbled down on a blank index card as I had stood in front of the painting Orange Sea (San Onofre). Most of the foreground was dominated by a handful of long-haired nudes swimming in a calm, yet strangely creamsicle-colored sea. But what I found myself haunted by was the specter of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (S.O.N.G.S.) in the background – a cause of concern for the late Carr, an academic and activist who had founded not only a comparative literature department, but also a grassroots anti-nuclear organization before his death in 1981. Like Carr had, I live along the Southern California coast, and I have passed S.O.N.G.S. every time I have driven down – or taken the train – to San Diego. Although it technically closed in 2013, the striking structure still stands at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

The poem that came to me, I called “The S.O.N.G.S. of Opened/Closed.”

The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was there.

S.O.N.G.S. opened in 1968.

                        Peter was 43.

                        Chad was not yet.

            Peter closed his eyes in 1981.

                        S.O.N.G.S. was still there.

            Chad opened his eyes in 1978.

                        S.O.N.G.S. was still there.

            S.O.N.G.S. closed in 2013.

                        Chad was 35.

                        Peter was not.

But S.O.N.G.S. is still there.

Because much of my recent research – including during my 2023 Fellowship in Ideas at Harrison Middleton University – is related to comics, I also found myself sketching out thumbnails for eight panels to spread the poem across. On the left, Carr’s cartoonish rendering of the twin containment domes that locals puckishly call “The Boobs” would take up the first panel, following by a two-panel sequence meant to represent his older eyes closing to the darkness of the fourth, black box. On the right, those four panels would be reversed, meant to represent my younger eyes opening from darkness to the sight of S.O.N.G.S. Since Carr painted Orange Sea (San Onofre) in acrylics on unprimed cardboard, I impulsively stopped by an art supply store on my way home to pick up paints and brushes and salvaged a cardboard “canvas” from the recycling bin next to my garage.

Considering that I hadn’t either written a poem or painted a picture in years, I was pretty happy with my first attempt at ekphrasis. And, procrastinating teacher that I was – and admirer of Great Books that I am – I started to research the ancient form of writing I had unexpectedly become a modern practitioner of.

So, it turns out that Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid aren’t only the inspirations for the delightful type of lottery – the casting of Homeric and Virgilian lots – that I wrote about back in a 2023 blog for HMU. These Great Books also contain two of the most famous examples of ekphrasis – Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad and Virgil’s description of the shield of Aeneas in Book VIII of the Aeneid.

Homer’s probable contemporary Hesiod performed a similar act of ekphrasis in the epic poem Shield of Heracles. So it is not only the word ekphrasis, but also a couple of exceptional examples of it, that come to us from ancient Greece. In antiquity, ekphrasis was understood more generally, as a vivid description of an object – such as a shield or an urn. Speaking of urns, another of the most famous examples of ekphrasis is John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” All four of those examples – from Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, and Keats – are technically notional ekphrasis because the writers are describing imaginary objects for rhetorical purposes.

In modernity, ekphrasis is understood more specifically, as a vivid description of a work of art – such as a sculpture or a painting. Two excellent examples of this from the twentieth century are the poems “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden and “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams. Both of these are examples of not notional, but actual ekphrasis because the writers are describing a real work of art – specifically, the sixteenth-century painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Brueghel’s painting was, in turn, inspired by one of the most famous myths of antiquity, in which the inventor Daedalus warns his son Icarus not to fly too close to the sun with the wings he has crafted from birds’ feathers and bees’ wax. Icarus, as students of mythology well know, does not heed his father’s warning, so he falls into the sea and drowns in its waters.

What struck both Auden and Williams about Brueghel’s rendering of this tragedy is how he emphasized an anonymous farmer plowing a field in the foreground and de-emphasized the infamous Icarus downing in the sea in the background. The point they perceived from this artistic choice is how humans are so often oblivious to suffering – or even death – in the “background” while they are living their own lives in the “foreground.” As Auden expresses it:

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Similarly, Williams notices how:

            unsignificantly

            off the coast

there was

            a splash quite unnoticed

            this was

            Icarus drowning

There is a similar dynamic in Carr’s painting Orange Sea (San Onofre), which is what attracted my eyes and inspired my attempt at ekphrasis. Again, the focus in the foreground is on folks who are oblivious to the dangerous situation in the background – the nuclear power plant at the edge of the water where they swim. Although the eyes of the beholder are directed toward S.O.N.G.S. by the artist’s choice to frame it between the head and the feet of one of the largest swimmers, the eyes of her and her frolicking companions look in every direction but that.

But S.O.N.G.S. is still there.

And that fact, that the now-decommissioned power plant and the nuclear waste created during its decades of operation will continue to linger in the background for many years for those of us who live our lives along the Southern California, was a meaning embedded in Carr’s work of art I wanted to communicate to the readers of my ekphrastic comic.

The exhibit that inspired my experiment with ekphrasis – “Peter Carr: Artist for Survival,” which was co-curated by James MacDevitt and Andrew Tonkovich – closed in December. But if you are interested in making your own attempt at ekphrasis, any exhibition at any gallery or museum has the potential to inspire you to write a vivid, detailed description of a work of art.

Since I am a professor, after all, here are the steps I would suggest that you take. First, go to a gallery or a museum. Second, browse the works in the exhibition. Third, stop in front of a work of art that attracts your eyes. Fourth, take notes on the particular aspect of that sculpture, painting, or photograph that seems meaningful to you. (And, maybe, sketch thumbnails for an ekphrastic comic.) Fifth, if it is allowed by the gallery or museum, take a photo of the work of art as well as its accompanying description, so you can review them later.

Although, in the examples I have quoted from here, the writers have expressed their interpretations of a work of art, that is not the only option for ekphrasis. Others include speaking to the image or making it speak to you and your audience. Those options are in line with the literal meaning of the word ekphrasis, which is a combination of the Greek roots ek-, or “out,” and -phrasis, related to how one “speaks.” So the essence of ekphrasis is to “speak out,” either to, for, or about, the work of art.

Works Cited

Auden, W.H. “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Poetryfoundation.org, Poetry Foundation, 1979,

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/159364/musee-des-beaux-arts-63a1efde036cd. Accessed 26 Dec. 2024.

Williams, William Carlos. “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Poets.org, Academy of American

Poets, 1962, https://poets.org/poem/landscape-fall-icarus. Accessed 26 Dec. 2024.

A graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, Chad Greene is a professor of English at Cerritos College. In addition to Citric Acid, his writing has appeared in Doubleback Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, Literary Orphans, Litro Magazine, Oblong, The Portland Review, Rio Grande Review, RipRap, Southern California Review, Stymie, and Westwind.