Somebody landed on this bit of cyber real estate after searching, “Is writing similar to painting?” In a way yes, in a way no, I suppose. They’re different languages. I think the experience as a painter is very different, more physical. In painting, everything is frozen in time. You get it all at once, even though you may not be able to take it in all at once. To experience writing you have to give it time to get from beginning to end. Paintings are all beginning and end. But doing the work I guess you face a lot of similar creative problems.
What do you think?
27th Street 
I think what you say is very true. I’d not really thought about this until I came across Japanese art. Because the writing system is pictorial, the same tools (generally brushes) are used for both writing and painting. In order to write, you had to learn to paint (at least the same techniques of painting) and the border between writing and painting gets blurred. Interestingly, though, the traditional Japanese approach to learning to paint is very similar to most people’s experience of learning to write: repetitive copying of fixed forms to the point of mastery.
I get excited about the borderlands between writing and painting/drawing/image making. I suppose calligraphy and modern art typography pull writing towards having more of the qualities of painting – immediate visual impression. I wonder what approaches make painting more like writing. Maybe triptych? Have you ever tried to make a painting that was meant to be viewed from left to right? Something like Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ is almost too wide to fit simultaneously in the field of vision; I find I habitually look at it from left to right, receiving a series of smoothly interlocking impressions.
Hmm … you’ve got me thinking again. Sorry for hijacking your comments feed to do some thinking out loud 😉
Thanks for your excellent comments.
I’ve made quite a number of diptychs which have a specific left/right orientation, and I understand what you’re getting at.
Japanese art is an excellent example. I hadn’t thought about that.
Several years ago I made a series of paintings that featured stenciled letters but they didn’t spell anything. Yet people looked at them like word search puzzles trying to find hidden messages that were not there. In my last show, I did a painting that had some text-like marks. They evoked text but they weren’t actually any real letters. Several people asked me what the letters were. Lots of people like to lean of words and descriptions and explanations to help them deal with painting. The challenge if a painting has text integrated is that the text adds such a specific descriptor. In a way it holds the painting back.