The Artist and the Feast: A Guest Post by Lucy Steeds

Get enamored by the landscapes of Provence in this deliciously crafted story of art, yearning and ambition. When a curious journalist and an ambitious young woman cross paths, an unexpected artist emerges from the kitchen, changing both of their lives. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Lucy Steeds on writing Our Monthly Pick, The Artist and the Feast.

The Artist and the Feast is a captivating novel of love, art, food, desire and thwarted ambition, which builds propulsively over one scorching French summer in 1920s Provence.

Someone once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture.* Writing about art is similar: attempting to describe a painting in words does indeed feel like trying to tap dance about the Empire State Building.

How does one translate a painting into words? What does one lose in the process? What can one gain? This was the dilemma faced by my fictional character Joseph in The Artist and the Feast, a journalist trying to write about a reclusive painter, and also by me, the author trying to describe the fictional painter’s fictional paintings.

I’m a very visual reader, and a very visual writer. I’m also acutely aware that not everyone is. I needed to find a way of describing paintings which worked not only for readers like me who could visualise them, but also for readers who don’t picture anything as they read. It was virtually useless, I realised, to describe a painting anatomically: by saying ‘there is a three-inch horizontal line of green in the top right-hand corner.’ These words felt like the choreography of a dance, not the dance itself. They were the bone-dry notation, not the flesh-and-blood movement itself. I needed to find another way in.

I went to art galleries and planted myself in front of a single painting. I let it fill my vision and just stared at it for an hour. I connected my pen to page and did ‘free writing’, scribbling whatever came into my head. It was impressionistic, spontaneous, and produced some of the most surprising ways of writing about art I’d yet come up with. I found myself fixating on the texture of the paint. The movement of the brushstrokes. The molten glossiness of the colours.

Making up fictional works of art was an incredibly fun part of writing The Artist and the Feast. Tartuffe is not a real painter but I wanted to embed him in an authentic artistic context, and I took inspiration from the Post-Impressionists who flocked to Provence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cézanne’s apples, Van Gogh’s hay bales and Gauguin’s burnished hills were all swirling around my mind as I created imaginary paintings and put them in the book.

Some of the most gratifying responses I’ve had to The Artist and the Feast are from readers who have said ‘I could picture every painting.’ Or, even better: ‘I Googled the paintings because I thought they were real.’

You will find no Bathers at Arles or Young Man with Orange in any gallery. There is no Lemon in Sunlight hanging on a wall somewhere. They exist only between the pages of this book, and in the reader’s mind, and I love that they will look different for each and every one.

*This has been variously attributed to Frank Zappa, William S. Burroughs and Thelonius Monk