In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 271.
Every creative medium—music, theater, visual art, poetry—has its unique power. A symphony does something that a painting can’t, and vice versa. But what if we could combine the power of these mediums by bringing one into the other? Enter ekphrasis, or the vivid description, via writing, of visual art.
Ekphrasis comes to us from the poetic tradition—in the Iliad, Homer described the Shield of Achilles; centuries later, Rainer Maria Rilke invoked a statue of the “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” the title of his most famous poem. These ekphrastic writings aren’t entirely alike: Homer’s use of the device instills the listener with a sense of grandeur and divine power, whereas Rilke’s reflection on the statue is more personal, and philosophical. “We cannot know his legendary head / with eyes like ripening fruit,” Rilke begins, ending the poem with the exhortation: “You must change your life.” In his meditation on this statue of Apollo—its head missing, its mysterious, charismatic torso—Rilke goes beyond visual description to bring us close to his felt experience of the sculpture. What’s important isn’t that we see the statue in our mind’s eye, but that we see what Rilke saw.
In my own writing practice, I like to think of ekphrasis as an emotional rather than practical act. I know that writing isn’t equivalent to painting or photography. It’s a completely different medium, and I’m not so interested in precisely describing an image. What I hope to capture instead is an emotional response to art: What does a painting make me think of? What does this photograph seem to say to me? And how can I tease all of this out for the reader, to share what this piece of art meant to me? This kind of art writing—less art historical, more art emotional—was the backbone of my essay collection, Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy (Catapult, 2021). In Discipline (Random House, 2026), I wanted to continue incorporating visual art, but in fiction, I realized, art wasn’t only a way to provide insights into character: Art offered a whole field of imagery and associations, ways to enrich the world-building of a novel. The first five chapters of Discipline are named after artists, and the themes of each chapter, though loosely held, are drawn from aspects of those artists’ work.
In her beautiful, elegiac novel Cold Enough for Snow (New Directions, 2022), Jessica Au places her characters, a mother and daughter, in a James Turrell exhibition, though Au doesn’t refer to Turrell by name. The two enter a part of the exhibit that consists of a completely dark room: “Somehow, the enveloping blackness of the room made us all silent too, in a way that was both anticipatory and slightly unbearable,” Au writes. Then something happens: “[A] small square of orange light began to appear in the distance. It was as faint as the dawn and, like the dawn, we had to wait a long time until we could fully see it.” The power of this scene isn’t in the visual description of the work, but in the emotions Au evokes—the silence of the dark room, which mirrors the unspoken aspects of the novel’s mother-daughter relationship; the appearance of light that’s compared not to a flame or a lamp but to the tentative beginning of dawn. Might something similar happen in their relationship?
When a character encounters a piece of art, it offers her something to respond to. What might it remind her of? How does it make her feel? All of this is more information, more material for your story or novel. If that artwork exists in the non-fictional world, you also gain access to that work’s associations, creating tone and mood. Visual art has power. Ekphrastic writing gives us access to it.
Larissa Pham is the author of the novel Discipline (Random House, 2026); the essay collection Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy (Catapult, 2021), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard prize; and the novella Fantasian (Badlands Unlimited, 2016). She teaches creative writing at the New School in New York.
image credit: Tasha Kostyuk