Images vs Words - Artists vs Writers

Can an image tell a story? Or is it only once words are added that an image becomes a narrative? Is art a form of language?

As part of an individual project I will be interviewing artists on my blog about whether they feel their art work is telling a story or whether the story is only built once an image is related to words: whether this be through thought, vocal or written language. My plan is to discover what a more powerful storytelling tool is: images or words.

I will also be looking at various pieces of art and writing a creative response in the form of poetry or micro fictions. This is to asses the storytelling aspect of the picture and how the image itself represents a story. I want to discover whether the organicness of the image is telling a story or whether it is the writer who adapts it to a story.




My first artist example is Russell Morgan, an illustrator based in Kettering. I met Russell at the World Horror Convention 2010 in Brighton earlier this year and was particularly taken by his work. I like how thousands of tiny tiny dots scrunched together can create an image. I think Russell's work has a particularly strong storytelling element to it: his pieces seem to feature a character and always portray a strong emotion. For example the picture below: Suppressed Memory, builds a series of stories in my mind.

The piece by Russell which I have used for my creative response is titled: Arupa Lipica, as per the below.

I will post my response to this seperately.

My project will take the form of interview's with artists, posted here, and my personal creative response to images through fiction writing which, I will share an example of here. The first interview will be with John Routeledge: a photographer and sculpture based down is Essex! Watch this space!