Visual Content:
how one writer sees the world

A portfolio by Steven McQuinn
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As some of the poster gallery animated thumbnails preload in the background, let me do a little vamping here by posing rhetorical questions.

Wouldn't you agree that there are at least two kinds of writers? And wouldn't you concur further that one of those types is in love with words, and the other type is in love with imagery? There, that's settled.

The literary type of writer can trace antecedents back to the oral tradition. Words meld in rhythm and sound, a kind of song, a hymn sung in reverence to language. These folks would fare well round a campfire extolling the heroism of the hunt, especially a failed hunt hyped to epic proportions.

The imagery type of writer paints pictures with words by splashing colors and actions and even sounds across the canvas of your mind, a sensory smorgasbord, flavors for the soul's own palate. These are the cave artists who strive to describe their paintings to anyone who won't bother to pay a visit.

We're dealing with polarities, of course, the endpoints of a spectrum. I'm mostly visual, using words as surrogates for photons, soundwaves and wafts of fragrance to create within your imagination an inner reality.

I make the point to introduce not my writing samples but my visual work. With this stuff the right brain asserts primacy as the source of inspiration, even though the left brain remains privileged to make the director's final cut.

Not that these images are raw. Hardly that. If anything they are excessively rational-- engineered, really. But no words interfered with their production. They were born as images and they matured as images.

My right brain says to my left, "I did this without your help." And my left brain answers, "Nothing that can't be improved by a little commentary."

Well, you see how it goes, this endless bickering within an artist's skull, this dialectic called creativity. All in a day's work.