Literature and Art

As I told you before, I'm really into literature, and I love to read all kinds of books and articles. Because I'm also so into art, I often find myself reading pieces that can relate art to literature. I like being able really to 'see' what I am reading, and I really love reading about art that I've seen before. It just makes the story easier to understand. An example would be picture books. Kids love picture books because they literally get to see what they are reading about. The problem with picture books is that they leave little room for imagination; they already give the picture of what they are about. Kids don't really think about all that though, do they? And how many adults do you know who read picture books anyways?

Books like Laurell K. Hamilton's "Anita Blake" series, or Patricia Cornwell's "Dr. Kay Scarpetta" series give the reader a well-rounded amount of character and scene description while leaving a window of space for the reader's imagination to form it's own mental image. The "Anita Blake" series is a fictional series about a vampire and werewolf hunter. The stories themselves are great, sure, but what I love is the way the author often references famous works of art to things happening in her stories. In Hamilton's book "The Killing Dance" she describes a scene in which the king vampire lives, and she uses Salvador Dali's famous clock piece, "The Persistence of Memory" as a visual reference. That is a prime example of what I would love to learn how to do. She references scenes she's describing to known works of art to help the reader form a mental image of what's going on in the story. It's a great way to really understand what's going on. 

Authors like this make reading so much more interesting. After all, doesn't everyone love being able truly to see what they read?