Art Begets Art -- Natalie Goldberg's Painting Nurtures Her Writing

Natalie Goldberg had to forsake painting before she discovered how important it really was - especially to her life as a writer.

"What I really saw was: Anything, if you're really awake, is an art form. Raising children can be an art form," the author, best known for her inspirational creative-writing book "Writing Down the Bones," said last week in Seattle.

For instance, Goldberg's artist-friend Barbara Zaring has elevated serious reading to an art. In her Taos, N.M., studio, Zaring alternates work before her latest canvas with periods of deep concentration in literature - heavy stuff: Dante, Dostoyevsky. Another New Mexico artist-friend, Holly Roberts, is a world-class race-walker and has integrated that "art" into her life in the studio.

For Goldberg, who has always seen writing as her life's work, the painting she has practiced for two decades is the secondary art that feeds and nurtures her primary creative work. But she didn't fully appreciate its importance until 1986, when deep into the writing of her novel "Banana Rose," she decided to focus her energies solely on the written word.

"At the time, it seemed to express my dedication to writing. It seemed like a good idea. It wasn't," admits Goldberg in her new book, "Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World" (Bantam, $16.95).

"I continued to hack my way through that novel for the next three years, and I hated it. The only reason I continued was brute stubbornness and a faith in practice under all circumstances."

The new book, a copiously illustrated paperback original that features more than 60 of Goldberg's paintings, is a chronicle of her engagement in visual art: how she came to painting, how it has become part of her relationship with friends and family, and - most of all - how it has evolved as a necessary adjunct to her work as a writer.

"When I left painting, I didn't realize that I gave up a deep source of my writing, that place in me where I can let my work flow," writes Goldberg. "When I cut out painting, I cut off that underground stream of mayhem, joy, nonsense, absurdity . . . Without painting, sludge gathered at the mouth of the river and eventually clogged any flow. Writing received too much direct, conscious attention. I strangled it."

Not that she has any illusions about her painting. Goldberg loves it, she says, but she "wouldn't forsake writing for it."

"I wrote this book to really bring painting back into my life," she explained. "The book is really about a writer who happens to paint - it's not about Natalie Goldberg suddenly becoming a painter."

Visual art was not a part of her life as a child growing up on Long Island, she said - at least not until her Uncle Manny and Aunt Priscilla discovered Europe in the late '50s and brought back stories and photographs about artists such as Van Gogh, Matisse, Cezanne and Chagall.

"I was a deeply lazy child," Goldberg recalled with a grin. "I would have lain around all day, eaten Oreos and watched TV in my pajamas if I could."

Yet Aunt Priscilla took the time to explain some of the prints and pictures they collected, and a seed was planted in the young Natalie - a seed that took root and finally bore fruit in the mid-1970s, when Goldberg was teaching at an elementary school in Taos. On a whim, she borrowed a child's set of watercolors and painted a picture of a friend's adobe cottage, laboriously sketching the outline with her fountain pen, then filling in the colors.

"It was just pleasure - completely - and it still is a pleasure," said Goldberg.

Her style hasn't changed much over the years. As the colorful paintings in the book demonstrate, she still draws her subjects in pen-and-ink, then fills in the color from a watercolor set only slightly more sophisticated than the primary-school kits she used in the '70s. Her subjects tend to be close at hand and common: jalopy pickup trucks that ply Taos back streets, a friend's kitchen, her hotel room during a trip to France, a New Mexico landscape, a diner.

No one will ever accuse Goldberg of being the next Albrecht Durer. She embraces a sort of funky-primitive style that discounts draftsmanship in favor of loopy exuberance. Perspectives are skewed, and colors are always a surprise; an adobe house might be blue and the sky pink, and there's no such thing as a straight line.

This lends Goldberg's paintings all the energy and immediacy of cartoons, which in fact is what they are, and why they surely appeal to a wide range of viewers. As she writes: "Stepping through the belief that I must paint mud brown, I experienced an explosion of energy and freedom . . . That man is green, those sheep are maroon, that horse is scarlet, I suddenly wanted to shout. . ."

Yet another aspect of "Living Color" may be more influential with would-be artists in much the same way that a generation of aspiring writers has found motivation and direction in "Writing Down the Bones": Goldberg inspires without making judgments.

In this book, of course, she's discussing her own artwork. But she never talks in terms of "quality"; she never reflects on whether her art is "good enough" in comparison with some arbitrary standard - and she never apologizes for what it is.

In her Zen-inspired approach to creativity, Goldberg's paintings are simply what they are, loopy lines and all.

"Living Color" has its limitations, however. Perhaps because of the book's format - a profusely illustrated reminiscence, really - Goldberg never probes too deeply into the connection between visual and verbal images. And when she discusses the influence of Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn and her friend Barbara Zaring, the reader strains to imagine those artists' work, only to find yet more paintings by Goldberg - unavoidably lending the book something of the air of a vanity project concocted by a publisher on behalf of a popular author.

Yet Goldberg's easy candor and engaging art ultimately outweigh those concerns. Finally exploring her growing involvement in abstract art - again, we see no examples - she expresses her deep desire to "learn to paint without lines." No longer worried that her painting is a dilletantish diversion from writing, Natalie Goldberg now realizes its importance in her creative life:

"Writing had served me well, but I no longer had to be limited by it as my only tool," she writes. ". . . I was not flirting with painting."