Retrospective Exhibit Presents the Visual Art of Writer Peter Selgin

The Georgia College & State University Department of Art presents an exhibit featuring the art of Peter Selgin.

“Peter Selgin: A Retrospective of Visual Art” features over 60 original paintings, watercolors, gouaches, pen & ink drawings and notebooks spanning Selgin's years as a painter, illustrator and graphic designer.  Though Selgin teaches creative writing and is better-known at GCSU as a writer, novelist, essayist, playwright, editor and professor in GCSU’s Department of English. He is the author of the novels “Duplicity,” “Life Goes to the Movies” and “The Water Master;” the short-story collection “Drowning Lessons;” and a full-length memoir, “The Inventors.”

This exhibit will introduce audiences to a lesser-known part of Selgin’s creative output.

Looking ahead to the opening reception for “Peter Selgin: A Retrospective of Visual Art,” the artist and writer answered questions about these different aspects of his creative career and how they fit together in pursuit of his artistic vision.

We know you as a writer, but as this retrospective illustrates, you call upon many talents to communicate your creativity. What do the visual arts offer you as a creative communicator?

Some things can’t be said with words. During my second year at art school, I had the opposite experience when, having been scolded by my painting professor (who accused me of being an “artistic illiterate”), back in my rented room I switched on a black and white portable TV and caught Richard Burton delivering a monologue in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I found myself entranced not only by Burton’s delivery, but by Edward Albee’s words. I realized then that some things were beyond the reach of the visual arts; that while it may often be the case that a picture is worth a thousand words, just as often a thousand words are worth more than any picture. So I started writing.

As for what the visual arts offer me, apart from a chance to relieve my word-weary brain, they let me say the things that can’t be said or said in the best way with words, that want expression through colors, shapes, lines, and textures, the language of visual arts. Much as I love words —and like all writers I love them very much—no word for the color “red” (or scarlet or crimson or whatever you call it) does to us what the color does when we actually see it.

Do you use the painting, illustration and design work to communicate to your audiences ideas, feelings or meanings that are different from your written work? How so?

I’m always amused when I go to museums and read the sometimes silly commentaries curators and art historians append, explaining what “thoughts” Bonnard was expressing when he painted that still life or landscape or whatever. But if you’re a painter and not a historian or a critic, you know exactly what he was expressing, a bunch of shapes, lines, and colors that, combined, add up to the subject. There’s rarely much more to it than that. But to a visual artist those shapes, lines, and colors are enough.

One part of your visual repertoire is creating book covers. Can you describe your thoughts on the way the visual arts work in conjunction with or, possibly, against the written word in conveying thoughts and ideas?

When I decided to become an academic, I felt that to succeed I had to put my visual arts career aside. My paints, my easel, my drafting table, my flat files —all went into a storage facility in the Bronx, where they remained for seven years while I concentrated on writing and teaching writing. But more and more as time went on, I felt a lack, something missing from my life. A few years ago, as one of my service duties here, I took on the task of re-designing Arts & Letters, the national literary journal staffed by our graduate students. The result was my first cover design. Of all the things I’ve done as a visual artist, none has given me as much pleasure. Design, illustration, typography—cover design brings together all the things I love. Since then, I’ve designed hundreds of covers, including several for award-winning books. Since I’m also an author, I know first-hand what a good cover design—or its antithesis—can mean to someone who has spent years writing a book.

What do you hope your audience for this retrospective takes away from the exhibit?

Seeing so much of my life’s work gathered together for the first time in one place is an oddly gratifying experience. I say “oddly” because, through most of my life, I’ve never felt myself to be an especially disciplined person. Nor—except on rare occasions—have I considered myself a “hard worker.” Yet here is all this “work,” and in retrospect—technically at least—much of it looks as if it must have been hard indeed. Yet though the evidence of “work” is plain to see, it seems impossible to me that someone as lazy and undisciplined as I could have done it. Or is it just that I never experienced it as “work”? For me, mainly, it was doing what I wanted to do; it was joy. That’s what I want people to take away from this exhibition: the sense of joy that was mine in making these works.

“Peter Selgin: A Retrospective of Visual Art” will be on display through February 23, 2023 in the Underwood Gallery located at 102 S. Columbia St., Milledgeville.

An artist’s reception, featuring a violin recital by David Johnson and reading by Peter Selgin, takes place between 5 and 7 p.m., Thursday, January 19.