Véronique Plesch – Introduction Winter 2026: Words and Images

As I read through this issue and consider the theme of words and images—or, better put, of words in images (since our contributors are visual artists)—I am reminded of an early medieval anecdote, recounted in the Libri Carolini (a book commissioned by Emperor Charlemagne most certainly to Theodulf of Orleans) of a man whom an artist once presented with two pictures of beautiful women. When the artist added words to them, the one labeled “Virgin Mary” was venerated while the one with “Venus” was discarded. Commenting on this anecdote, Rosamund McKitterick concludes: “it is the written word which gives the picture . . . its identity, and its power.” Indeed, ours is a logocentric culture, in which words are invested with an authority we deny images. After all, the Gospel of John opens with this affirmation: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And yet, as the adage goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words”! So what is the motivation for visual artists to put words in their works? What does the inclusion of words in visual art achieve? Why should one combine the visual with the verbal, these two modes of expression that are fundamentally different?

The words Tollef Runquist introduces in his paintings are “something that interrupts the usual flow of looking”; they function as traps for the viewer, making them pause. Runquist is interested in the tension generated by the association and interaction of words and images, when they agree or when they contradict each other, when words behave “like a stutter.” Fascinated by instances when meaning is difficult to access (for instance in a worn poster), Runquist explores the gaps between perception and expectations, and how associations help us face elusive meanings.

On the occasion of the current retrospective at the Colby College Museum of Art of Laylah Ali’s drawings, Carl Little notes how for Ali the combination of textual and visual elements “refuse[s] cut-and-dry readings”: associating the two discourses, often in ways in which the connections are “not obvious,” results in problematizing communication—or perhaps reveals that a clear message is an illusion. Little reproduces Ali’s answers to an email in which she reflects on what prompts her to use words in her images.

As poet Stuart Kestenbaum reflects on his first collaboration with his wife and visual artist Susan Webster, he describes their process merging text and image and envisions its take-aways. Kestenbaum marvels at the “tactile connection” he felt while stamping each letter individually and how “the text itself became a visual object.” He also considers how this experience and those that followed made him “less doctrinaire” in accepting the fragmentary and illegible.

Issues of intelligibility are also central to Shanna Compton’s work. Carl Little discusses the cut-and-paste collages that appear in her new book, Deep Whoosh. In answers to Little, Compton addresses the role that words play in her collages and in particular their reference to the closed captions that appear on screens for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Here too we are made to reflect on the visual dimension of text, when Compton notes how captions play a role in one’s “viewing experience when watching movies.”

In Susan Groce’s travel diaries and resulting multi-media works, “text is image—visually and conceptually.” Groce explains how these works that take years to create blend the boundaries between words and images. The artist’s painstaking process is echoed in the concentration required in the viewer, who “first sees text as purely visual elements—textures, patterns, and value gradations—but on close inspection the text becomes obvious, yet intentionally it is not easily read.” Nor is it easily understood, for it is meant to remain a mystery, engaging in what Groce describes as “the alchemy of text and image,” that invites the viewer to travel to a “mysterious and magical space.”

Similarly to what happens to Susan Groce’s viewer, at first one doesn’t notice the text in Stephen Hannock’s panoramic Vistas with Text. Véronique Plesch shares excerpts from conversations with Hannock in which they discuss his use of words. Hannock explains how memories surge when he’s at work: “You are haunted by these events as you’re moving paint. And sometimes it gets to the point where you’ve got to write this down.” As he interacts with the landscape, writing and painting coalesce, and he finds a “calligraphic rhythm” in both. In the end, Hannock hopes “to give the viewer a moment that they’re thoroughly unfamiliar with, and one that holds their interest to the point where they will discover things on their own.”

Maps consist of words (toponyms) written on a visual representation of land. In her cartographic work, Margaret Wickens Pearce, gives voice to Indigenous peoples; as she said in a conversation with Claire Millikin, “[t]he land speaks” and thus “cartographic language is an active agent” that brings healing. Iyoka Eli-Wihtamakw Kǝtahkinawal / This is How We Name Our Lands, Pearce’s large double-sided (Penobscot/English) map of the area now known as Maine is the result of intensive work and of collaboration with Penobscot Nation members and includes artwork by James Francis (Penobscot). For Millikin, Pearce’s work “in restoring Indigenous naming to this land is the work of restoring sovereignty to Indigenous peoples.”

Carl Little contacted Abbie Read to discuss her artistic practice, in particular her work that involves the creation of artists’ books and the incorporation of book covers. She discusses her interest in libraries and in books and the significance they hold for her. Memory is also central to her practice: books remind her of father, an English teacher, and the impetus for one of her pieces was a plane accident she survived. The words she collected from friends happen to be superimposed on charts of Penobscot Bay: here too a visual representation of a place gets inscribed with words. For Read, “words are more textural than textual” and “the writing becomes the image as well as the content.”

In his “geometric ‘gem’ style” Ryan Adams embeds statements whose emotional content determines the color scheme. Adams strives to come up with pithy declarations that appear within a “visually dynamic composition that can draw someone in before engaging with the words within.” Although “[l]etterforms dictate a large portion of [his] compositions,” here too, accessing the verbal component is not immediate as the letters are somewhat hidden. As a result, the artist lures his viewers into spending time engaging with the work. Adams tells us about the ways in which he is indebted to graffiti, which he considers his “foundation,” a practice “centered around creatively bending and abstracting letterforms as far as they can while still maintaining their function and legibility.”

Words are indeed central to graffiti—referred to by its practitioners (such as Adams) as “graffiti writing.” Véronique Plesch shares a collection of photographs taken over the past forty years throughout the world along with some considerations on graffiti’s distinctive features. Right here in Maine, Battery Steele on Peaks Island is home to a trove of graffiti, some of which Natasha Mayers captured in photos. The placards that were displayed last June at No Kings Day rallies, “effectively combine words and images.” MAJ assembled a selection from demonstrations that took place in different Maine locations.

Edgar Allen Beem writes about Maret Hensick, who died last August. Focusing on her series Flowers Past and Present, Beem notes that “words came to animate her images both as text and elements of design.” In these mixed-media works that depict flowers from the artist’s garden, words come from collaged materials extracted from a box holding her mother’s mementos. Hensick, we learn, had a deep commitment to both words and images as she declared, yearning for a utopia in which the two would merge: “Sometimes I think that if I could paint poetry with paint, it would be the best of worlds.”

Carl Little reports on an exhibition that took place last October in the context of Blue Hill’s literary festival, Word. Lee Lehto, the show’s initiator and curator, explains that the entries “must either include actual words or letters, involve a ‘book’ form, or be created by an artist who is also a poet or writer of some kind.” Little’s dispatch includes a selection of works from the exhibition.

In her “Art Historical Musings” column, Véronique Plesch mentions her long involvement with the scholarly field of word and image studies, and sketches the history of the exploration of the relationships between the two modes of expression. As she considers word/image interactions, she discusses what is at stake in practices such as describing works of art, using titles, inserting words in artworks, and turning words (and letters) into art. Plesch also tackles the question of legibility (and of illegibility), of the often conflictual relationship between the visual and the verbal, and also of how the word/image dichotomy can be transcended.

Sixteen members of the Union of Maine Visual Artists were inspired by our theme. In the first showcase, Adam Daley Wilson explains how his “text-based pieces” fit into what he calls “Post-Theory Art” and “artist-placed public document art” and how they communicate in a manner that engages “the emotional and sensorial, not just the cognitive.” Mark Melnicove discusses the practice he has carried out for half a century, “altering words from the texts of other writers” through means such as cutting out words and reassembling them, “whitening out,” or crossing out words. He notes that with the inclusion of collaged elements he achieved a “rejiggering of texts and pictures” in which “[n]othing was predetermined (or untouchable).” Liz Starr writes about her “poem paintings” and their material nature: “I can hold it in my hands as I read the poem.” For Starr, the combined activities of writing and drawing” are fundamentally exploratory and generate “even more mystery, questions, and more conundrums.” Laura Dunn feels that the words in her artwork are “like a shot in the arm, they go directly into the blood stream, causing a visceral reaction”: they are declarations of beliefs. Dunn also discusses the presence of “asemic writing” in her paintings.

In our second showcase, Lesia Sochor shares some of the ways in which words appear in her body of work that draws on the metaphor of sewing. We see words becoming “thread winding around the spool” and transcribing personal stories, “words as declarative and political statements” on sewing patterns, words in support of Ukraine that accompany the depiction of a babushka. Words are also present in Sochor’s art through hands spelling letters in the American Sign Language. For calligrapher Jan Owen, “[i]t is difficult to separate word and image.” Owen evokes letterforms’ visual qualities and the expressiveness of a calligraphic line as the product of “the hand, mind, and brain work[ing] together.” Recognizing the power of words, Susan Webster declares “words have always mattered to me.” At times, she strives to make her text legible, while at others she prefers to “bury or disguise letters within the composition, to be discovered later,” or even to use textual fragments to allow for her viewers “to determine their own meaning.” Marjorie Arnett believes that “[w]ords strengthen the content of the visual impact” and thus are an integral part of her paintings.

In the third showcase we discover Stephen Burt’s current body of work, meant to “call attention to the horrors headed our way” and which combines meaningful sayings with imagery that possesses “strangeness and urgency.” While the words appear in banners in order to “directly address the viewer,” they often require effort to decipher. Jon Luoma uses quotations from Henry David Thoreau, so his ink and watercolor drawings can act as “inspirational ‘advertisements’” for the author’s “poetic and forward-looking nature and wildness advocacy.” Liz Moberg as well reacts to our current times, creating and mailing to government offices postcards that merge text and image in powerfully simple and direct messages. Amy Tingle’s “narrative embroideries” integrate words to confront personal and familial memories and traumas. Just like Tingle’s recycled fabrics possess intimate resonances, the vintage printed matter that Heather Newton Brown incorporates in her paintings conveys “haunting similarities” to our current times.

In the fourth showcase, Kenny Cole shares some of his recent text-based works in which he aims at “deconstructing some threads of political banter.” Cole explains that the “painterly process of transcription” of texts from ideologically fraught sources provides him “with the measured experience of building and developing a critical response to flawed beliefs.” Mark Barnette’s series I Saw All the Children’s Graves is a personal response to the War in Palestine, which involved his photographing every single grave of children in Portland’s Evergreen Cemetery. John Ripton unpacks some of his photographs, which “represent contemporary realities” while the words in them “convey heavy irony.” Kelly Desrosiers shares work that is the product of two activities, one involving art making (learning intaglio) and the other reading (“historical accounts of the big game hunters in Africa and Asia”).

Carl Little writes about the life and work of novelist and former Maine poet laureate Baron Wormser, who died last October. Wormser was a revered teacher, and to celebrate his legacy, MAJ poetry editor Betsy Sholl contacted five poets (Marcia F. Brown, Glenn Morazzini, Dawn Potter, Ian Ramsey, and David Stankiewicz) who studied with Wormser, inviting them to share one of his poems along with a short text explaining their choice.

In its quarterly report ARRT! (Artists’ Rapid Response Team!) notes: “The theme for this MAJ issue, Words and Images, is what ARRT! is all about!” Read about the recent ways in which ARRT! and LumenARRT! have used banners, placards, video projections, graphic design production, and interactive media projects to “create a visual voice” for “progressive groups and organizations throughout Maine.” As usual, we also include quarterly reports from UMVA chapters. The Portland chapter is planning an exhibition to be held in May and the Midcoast chapter has calls for contributions to two forthcoming exhibitions in Camden. UMVA president Joanne Tarlin recaps the many initiatives the union has sponsored in 2025 and appeals to your support for 2026.

We conclude this issue with Tony Owen’s letter from Ireland, who reproduces a page from a 1989 UMVA newsletter, with a self-portrait and poem by Stephen Petroff. The juxtaposition of the poet’s likeness next to the short poem that contains no less than four statements in the first person, suggests that the words are spoken by Petroff himself. Owen also includes two paintings by his wife Pat that associate the image of a gate with words, in both English and Irish. Owen explains that these paintings “are so much more than about gates and words. They are about fusing a past with the present, about hoping to find a place as meaningful as the one she left behind.” We could add that they are also about fusing words with images.

As this issue shows, the motivations for combining words and images and the modalities of their interaction run the gamut—they are probably as many as there are artists. In the visual arts, the recourse to words may seem at first glance a sheer addition, a flourish, a supplement. But, as Jacques Derrida reminds us, the very concept of “supplement” is an ambiguous one as it means both addition and substitute, it is external but fulfills an internal absence. Derrida continues: “The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence.” Derrida wrote this in a chapter titled “. . . That Dangerous Supplement . . .” (a phrase borrowed from Jean-Jacques Rousseau). And although Derrida was not dealing with words and images, what he says about the “supplement” is thought-provoking (even if rather impenetrable!). The attempt to fulfill something that’s missing—that is, to achieve something one longs for—is central to many of our contributions; we see for instance poets hoping to endow their texts with a physical, material, tangible quality. Adding words to images might seem an innocuous operation—after all, we have witnessed this since times immemorial. But in this supplement (in the Derridean sense), there is indeed something radical, even dangerous. A remarkable phenomenon emerges from this issue, evidenced by several of our contributors: the presence of words within images, instead of fixing and even over-determining meaning, allows the resulting artwork to be richer, more open-ended, more expansive, more inclusive, and less despotic in how it communicates with the viewer.

 

References

Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967. English: Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Quote is on p. 144.

McKitterick, Rosamund. “Text and Image in the Carolingian World.” In The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe. Ed. Rosamund McKitterick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 297–318. Quote is on p. 309.