David Montenegro
AN INTERVIEW WITH DEREK WALCOTT
DM:
Could we start with "Another Life," your longest poem, and, in partic–
ular, with Part One, "A Divided Child"? Would you talk about the divisions,
beginning with painting, since, in the poem, you start with painting and, in a
sense, end by choosing poetry as a vocation?
DW:
I didn't give up painting. I do a lot of storyboards for my filmscripts and
plays, and I do them in a lot of detail. I draw carefully, although a storyboard
merely dramatizes an incident or focuses on a different angle, and so on. I still
do a fair amount of watercolor painting from nature. I haven't done - as I
thought I would have - much oil painting on canvas.
Last summer I strongly resolved that I'd go back to the rigidities of
drawing and painting, and that I'd give myself a heavy schedule for doing
them daily. But that got broken again. When I'm in the Caribbean, my prime
attraction is towards representing it in painting. So I think there is still a dual
attraction for me to painting and poetry.
The division one talks about I don't think is ultimately a sort of career
decision between becoming a painter or a poet. You can't, obviously, put
words into paintings, but, on the other hand, I had the absorption of the visual
that is part of poetry and can be very strong, and I think that must be pre–
sent in the sort of
frame
of work on a line or even a stanza sometimes. On
the other hand, I have a quite different approach to what I'd like to achieve
in painting. I think it's perhaps not as - I wouldn't say ambitious - not as ar–
duous perhaps, not as sweaty or industrious as with the writing.
There's more to it than that, though. The older I get, I realize that I'm
a pretty competent draughtsman, and I'll get better with practice. And the
watercolors are getting better. But
all
I'm after really is a visual representa–
tion of a thing that I see in front of me. I am very square when it comes to
painting, especially watercolor, because in watercolor you can't really muck
around with abstraction. It's too delicate a medium. Oils can be very
rhetorical, in that sense, very pretentious sometimes, especially abstract
painting. So I love watercolor because it's harder really than oils. It's less
egotistical.
So I haven't given up the idea of painting. I suppose, in "Another Life,"
the section I'd refer to would be the one that talks about what exists in the
wrist of a painter - the true painter - which is a very confident flourish, a
feel for the weight of the paint and how it's confidently manipulated, that I
didn't think I had. I don't think now that that's necessarily a condemnation.
There are different kinds of painters. There are those who layer and build,
and those who slash and mount and increase the surface of the canvas by
Editor's Note: This interview took place in Boston on September 4, 1987.
