AWA BLOG # 37 ARTISTS AS WRITERS, WRITERS AS ARTISTS
Mar 1, 2026
By Jann Haynes Gilmore, PhD, AWA Board Member
Lauren Pope, Flannery O’Connor, n.d. Book Cover, Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, Boston: Little, Brown, 2009. [Image: Emily Temple, 33 Portraits of Flannery O’Connor: Because Good Fan Art is Hard to Find, August 3, 2018, The Lit Hub Daily, lithub.com.
A recent discovery of unknown and rescued artwork by renowned southern writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) has revived interest in the subject of dual creative production. “Artists and writers often blend their discipline, with visual art informing narrative and writing clarifying artistic concepts, creating a symbiotic loop where words paint pictures and images tell stories . . . .” 1 A search on Google’s Intersection of Writing and Visual Art references notable figures such as Sylvia Plath, Leo Tolstoy, E. E. Cummings, Mark Twain, Anne Sexton, D.H. Lawrence, Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Francesco Clemente as creatives who practiced dual disciplines. Other examples include artist Van Gogh through his visual images in letters; British author of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s drawings; Beatrice Potter, children’s books author who created scientific nature drawings; writer Henry Miller’s skillful use of watercolors; author Jack Kerouac’s illustrations of the Beat Generation’s counterculture; and playwright Tennessee Williams’s oil paintings, among others.
Additionally, well-known writing coach Natalie Goldberg, a New Mexico author of 15 successful books on the practice of writing, is also a visual artist. Her first acclaimed book, titled Writing Down the Bones, was published in 1984. In 2014, she reintroduced an earlier book titled Living Color: Painting, Writing and the Bones of Seeing, in which Goldberg promotes painting as a second art form for writers. She confesses her own secret delight in breaking the usual barriers of a single creative form and draws inspiration from her painted images that “tell a story.” Goldberg exhibits and sells her paintings. 2
Natalie Goldberg, artist, Book Cover: Living Color: Paintings, Writing, and the Bones of Seeing, Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2014.
A most interesting angle on the ‘symbiotic loop of writers and artists’ is a 2009 book by Gibbs Smith, owner of Gibbs Smith Publisher, titled The Art of the
Bookstore: The Bookstore Paintings of Gibbs M. Smith. Smith painted fifty-eight of his favorite bookstores worldwide, including Strand Bookstore in New York City, Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver, and Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, each a favorite among book lovers.3
Gibbs M. Smith, Summer Afternoon in Santa Fe (Collected Works Bookstore), oil on linen, 2009, illustrated in The Art of the Bookstore: The Bookstore Paintings of Gibbs M. Smith, Layton, Utah, Gibbs Smith Publisher, 2009
Revered 20th-century American poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) battled depression throughout her short life and expressed her vision of herself in her poetry. An exhibition titled One Life: Sylvia Plath was held at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in 2017, which explored the writer’s life and artwork. In her daughter Frieda Hughes’s book: Sylvia Plath: Drawings, Hughes relates that throughout her life, her mother “. . . cited art as her deepest source of inspiration.” Plath’s pen and ink drawings capture her exquisite observations of the world around her, including England, France, Spain, and New England.”4
Sylvia Plath, Houses [Cambridge], pen and ink, illustrated in Sylvia Plath’s Unseen Drawings and Edited by Her Daughter and Illuminated in Her Private Letters, Maria Popova, themarginalian.org.
In this essay, I focus on Mary Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), a celebrated southern author of novels and essays, who, throughout her brief life, enjoyed dual creative expression in both art and writing. Flannery O’Connor was born in Milledgeville, Georgia, and lived there for most of her life. As a child, she and her family lived in Savannah, Georgia, near her father’s relatives, where she attended Catholic schools and early on used her keen observation skills to satirize Southern religion and culture. An introvert, young O’Connor sought refuge in her Savannah family’s attic, writing, drawing, and collecting fowl, the latter becoming a lifelong passion.
Photograph of Flannery O’Connor at Andalusia with Peacocks [enlarged], Flannery O’Connor & Redemption Amidst the Grotesque, Vernonica Arntz, March 23, 2018, Catholic Exchange, catholicexchange.com.
When Flannery’s father died of lupus when she was 15, she and her mother returned permanently to Milledgeville, where she had already been attending high school. She did not like the progressive curriculum taught. She shyly interviewed to become the art editor of the student newspaper and began creating cartoons in block prints to record campus life. Over five years, her self-confidence and artwork flourished, as she produced 120 block prints. In her request to fill the art editor job, she had famously remarked, “I don’t know how to write,” adding, “but I can draw.” 5
Georgia State College for Women (established as a normal college in 1884) was located in Milledgeville, and it was only natural that Flannery enrolled in the local college weeks after graduating from high school in 1942, in the midst of World War II. According to biographer Brad Gooch, the college was noted for its distinguished Ph. D.-holding faculty from Chicago, Columbia, and other northern schools. Flannery’s mother lived in the antebellum Cline Mansion near campus, owned by her relatives. There, the Cline family and Flannery’s mother often entertained students and faculty, Catholic soldiers from nearby military bases, and rented to boarders. An “only child,’ Flannery absorbed this domestic milieu, which became fodder for much of her future literary work. She continued her prolific output of school-life cartoons and became the editor of the college’s literary magazine. She considered becoming a cartoonist as a profession upon graduation and was even invited to submit her work to the Atlanta Journal. She supplied the end pages for the yearbook depicting views of the campus in linoleum cuts, “always strong and decisive with an energy and angularity.” During these college years, she became an admirer of the legendary humorist James Thurber and frequently submitted her cartoons to The New Yorker, but they were always rejected.6
Flannery O’Connor, Cartoon with Caption: “I don’t enjoy looking at these old pictures either, but it doesn’t hurt my reputation for people to think I’m a lover of fine arts,” black and white linoleum print, illustrated by Barry Moser, Flannery O’Connor, Cartoonist, New York Book Review, July 6, 2012, nybooks.com.
Flannery was greatly influenced by an undergraduate professor who recognized her intelligence and urged her to attend graduate school. She applied to both Duke University and the University of Iowa’s journalism program. Her beloved professor, a graduate of the University of Iowa, procured a scholarship for her, and upon arriving on campus, she was soon admitted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 7 Graduating in 1947, Flannery had dropped her first name, Mary, and had become simply Flannery O’Connor, who would become one of America’s most important twentieth century writers.
Upon leaving Iowa with an MA and teaching fellowships in 1948, O’Connor was accepted at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she advanced her literary style and reputation and began two famous novels: her debut, Wise Blood (1952), The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and 31 short stories. Between 1956 and 1964, she wrote 100 literary reviews. At Yaddo, a famous artist and writer retreat, Flannery met poet Robert Lowell, a lifelong friend who helped shape her literary career; poet Robert Fitzgerald and wife, Sally, who invited her to live with them in Connecticut for two years after a stint in New York City; Caroline Gordon, fellow southerner and literary critic; and Robert Giroux, her future editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
At Christmas 1950, Flannery O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus, the incurable autoimmune disease that had killed her father. She was forced to return to the family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she remained for the rest of her life. Named Andalusia, the farm provided her a quiet life of writing every day, receiving many visitors, including literary figures and intelligentsia, and where she raised over fifty of her beloved peacocks, whom she called peafowl. Very soon, O’Connor had to use crutches to get around, and she humorously referred to them as her “flying buttresses.” O’Connor won literary awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Ford Foundation, the Kenyon Review, the O. Henry Award, the National Book Award for Fiction, and honorary doctorate degrees. In 2015, the United States Post Office issued a postage stamp in O’Connor’s honor. Flannery O’Connor died in 1964 at age 39, several months after surgery, and is buried in Milledgeville, Georgia.
Photograph of Flannery O’Connor, A quote by Flannery O’Connor, goodreads.com.
So why, as a great southern literary figure, is Flannery O’Connor associated with the subject of Writers as Artists? In addition to her youthful period of cartoon production, in 2023, two containers of paintings were discovered in Milledgeville, near the college campus, in a storage facility behind a Cook Out fast-food drive-through restaurant. These two dozen paintings by O’Connor were the subject of an exhibition at Georgia State University (formerly Georgia State College for Women), which received worldwide attention. This discovery was extensively covered by The New York Times in two full pages titled: Painting with Words, and Brushes, which reviewed the exhibition of seventy of O’Connor’s artworks at her alma mater in Milledgeville. The Times summarized its content: “Comprising painted woodcut caricatures from her childhood along with regional oil paintings from the peak of her writing career, the artworks shed new light on a literary vision cut far too short, . . .” 8 It is thought that her family, including her mother, kept these artworks from public view because they felt her artworks might detract from her literary fame. (Connor’s earlier cartoons were discovered when the college accepted the Cline Mansion as a gift from Cline relatives in 2023).
Woman in Red Dress, Flannery O’Connor, oil on board, n.d. [1930-1940s], illustrated in The Art Works of Flannery O’Connor’s Attic, Georgia Postcard, Charles Bethea, The New Yorker, March 24, 2025.
Woman, Flannery O’Connor, oil on board, n.d. [1930-1940s], illustrated in The Art Works of Flannery O’Connor’s Attic, Georgia Postcard, Charles Bethea, The New Yorker, March 24, 2025.
These regional paintings were first interpreted as a writer’s pastime, but further research has revealed that O’Connor’s artistic observations were learned and sophisticated. In letters, she wrote about Matisse, Rouault, Chagall, Rousseau, and Cezanne’s apples. Flannery’s paintings also acknowledge Impressionism and Post Impressionism, especially the influence of Raoul Dufy’s impasto techniques.
Her portraits delight the most, be they her caricatures that foretell the doomed preacher in her most famous novel, Wise Blood, or the depiction of an array of whimsical and grotesque southern citizens. Best of all is her own 1953 Self-Portrait with Pheasant Cock. Flannery described the work to a visitor as a “self-portrait with a pheasant cock that is really a cutter.” Gooch describes it this way: “. . . its full-on portrayal of herself, oval-eyed, wearing a fiery yellow halo of a sunhat, her arm wrapped about a fearsome dark bird.” O’Connor gave her own portrayal of the fowl in a personal letter: “He has horns and a face like the Devil.” O’Connor added: “The self-portrait was made ten years ago, after a very acute siege of lupus . . . so I looked pretty much like the portrait.” 9 I cannot help but think of Iowan painter Grant Wood’s iconic 1930 American Gothic artwork when analyzing O’Connor’s self-portrait’s stern, flat, frontal stance looking straight out of the frame at the viewer while holding a pheasant instead of a pitchfork. Grant Wood taught art at the University of Iowa from 1934 to 1942. Wood is considered the consummate American regionalist painter, and O’Connor is similarly described as the leading American regional writer in the Southern Gothic style. 10
Flannery O’Connor, Self-Portrait with cock,” 1953, The Lit Hub Daily, lithub.com.
Joe McTyre, photograph: Flannery O’Connor Sitting Beneath Her Self-Portrait, n.d., Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home, Savannah, Georgia, August 3, 2025, https://facebook.com/flanneryoconnorhome. [Appeared in Atlanta Journal- Constitution].
One of the best descriptions of O’Connor’s artwork, unsurprisingly, is found in America: The Jesuit Review by a writer who visited Andalusia, now a private foundation museum. He writes: “. . . Flannery was looking at life askew—composing art from an unexpected angle. She was also telling a story with minimal images and words, a skill that serves the writer well.” 11
Being a southern “only child” myself and growing up in a large family of great aunts, I hear, see, and feel intimacy with the region about which Flannery O’Connor wrote in which she exposed both its darker historic truths and its lighter, rich culture filled with moments of grace. My favorite quote by her sums up both her artwork and writings: “My subject of fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.” 12
Endnotes:
1. On January 22, 2026, I used the Google Search version of AI Overview to research this subject using the prompt, Artists as writers and vice versa.
2. Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones, Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1986; and Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World, STC Craft, 2022.
3. Gibbs M. Smith, The Art of the Bookstore: The Bookstore Paintings of Gibbs M. Smith, Layton, Utha, Gibbs Smith Publisher, 2009.
4. Freida Hughes, Sylvia Plath: Drawings, Harper, 2013; and One Life: Sylvia Plath, (exhibition), National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 2017. Also see: Sylvia Plath, Poetry Foundation https:/www.poetryfoundation.org.
5. Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, Boston: Little, Brown, 2009, p. 72. [This biography is considered the most thorough source to date on Flannery O’Connor].
6. Ibid., p. 111.
7. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop was established in 1936 and is the oldest writing program offering an MFA degree in the U.S. The Workshop has produced many literary journalists and shaped creative writing. en.wkipedia.org.
8. “She Painted with Words, And Brushes,” Arts, The New York Times, C 1-2, Sunday, March 22, 2025.
9. Gooch, p. 246.
10. Southern Gothic style is a literary genre that criticizes its regional society’s racism, classism and fixation on the past, aesthetics.fandom.com.
11. Maurice Timothy Reidy, “Flannery O’Connor’s artistic vision,” Art, America: The Jesuit Review, October 9, 2025, americanmagazine.org.
