Painter And Writer Mix Their Media

Consider the similarities between painting and writing.

Generally speaking, paints rest on canvas and inks stick to paper.

Yet now consider the differences: You can read a work of writing aloud, thereby lifting the words off the page entirely, but paints tend to remain where they have been brushed, daubed or splattered.

The images stay where the painter has placed them.

It’s interesting, then, to think of what the two art forms can do when working togehter. Which is what will happen at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Gonzaga University’s Jundt Art Center when author Mark Spragg and painter Robert Gilmore present a collaborative exhibit titled “Singing in High Places.”

Gilmore, a GU professor of art since 1968, will show some 35 recent paintings, two-thirds of which are from what he calls his “Mann Gulch;; series.

Spragg, who lives in Bozeman, Mont., will read from his collected essays - some of which were written in response to Gilmore’s “Mann Gulch” works.

The event’s title comes from an essay of Spragg’s that was included in “Echoes from the Summit,” a book that pairs the words of several writers with photographs of mountain scenery.

Gilmore wanted to do a smilar kind of pairing that featured Spragg’s words and his art. His inspiration was “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” the 1941 collaborative effort by writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans that documents the plight of Alabama sharecroppers.

Gilmore stresses that, like Agee and Evans, he and Spragg worked independently. Thought Spragg studied several of his paintings, and he has read much of Spragg’s past writings, Gilmore says their working relationship ended there.

“There’s no collusion involved,” he says. “It’s just two artists who share a lot of the same ideas about life.”

Some of those ideas, he says, reflect the concerns that the late Norman Maclean explored in his book “Young Men and Fire,” Maclean’s study of the tragic Mann Gulch fire of 1949. A crew of smokejumpers was caught in that fire, and 13 of them died.

Having read Maclean’s book, Gilmore wanted to explore the power of nature and, especially, the whims of fortune that can end life in an instant.

“That’s a prevailing theme in there,” Cilmore says of Maclean’s book. “We don’t know how long we have. We don’t know when it’s going to be over.”

Not that you’ll be able to see a direct representation of such themes in either Gilmore’s abstract studies, all of which have been painted since October, or Spragg’s metaphorical essays.

For example, Gilmore says of Spragg: “He’s got an essay in there about horses, but it’s not really about horses. And my paintings aren’t really about fires.”

The two plan to turn their collaboration into a book, and the prospect of that project particularly excites Gilmore.

“We’re just sort of artistically bouncing off each other,” he says.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: “Singing in High Places,” an evening with writer Mark Spragg and painter Robert Gilmore, will be held at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Kreielsheimer Studio of the Jundt Art Center of Gonzaga University. The event is free and open to the public.