Writing With Art for Inspiration
- 1 hour ago
- 4 min read
March 26, 2026
By Roy Hoffman, fiction and creative nonfiction faculty
With art nearby when I write, I find myself inspired, as a word person, by the color, shape, and texture of the visual. When visiting museums I take out my pocket notebook and jot down images or, on the street, feel enlivened by a sculpture, mural, or architectural marvel. In addition to nature’s art just beyond my porch—magnolias, camellias, so much more—we have works made by friends, or those acquired on trips, like aesthetic windows I can enter to freshen my creativity and deepen my capacity to see.
In my study is a row of masks whose faces look down on me as I write. Among them is a mask from the Lega people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a gift from a late friend of mine in New Orleans, Andy Antippas, a literature professor and art dealer. The face, with its straw beard, is impassive, his expression at first glance unknowable, with cutouts for eyes and mouth in the oval of wood. But as I look up from my endeavors he seems to reflect my moods, a timeless visage inviting me to cast my emotions into his.
Another is a double portrait by an Alabama artist, two rudimentary faces cut from sheet metal hammered onto a blue broken board, with fragments of pottery beneath. The signature, “Tin Man,” refers to Charlie “Tin Man” Lucas, an outsider artist in Selma, Alabama. I visited Lucas to write a profile of him and his neighbor Katherine Tucker Windham, a storyteller of ghost tales. When I gaze back at Tin Man’s faces, I am reminded how we can cobble together works of art from bits and pieces, can create treasures from what could be fragments for the trash heap.
At the top of our stairs is a painting as tall as I am, a branching of lines inspired by the rivers of a Texas boyhood. The pleasure of this artwork is aesthetic—ribbons of white, gray, and black acrylic on handmade paper, giving me the sensation of a physical landscape as well as an interior one, coursings of water, streams of thought. The delight is personal, too, in that the artist, Bill Pangburn, was my college roommate. Since then we’ve watched each other’s creativity evolve and mature.
An encaustic by Renee Magnanti, Bill’s wife, is in our dining room, a geometric puzzle of carved wax in different colors, inspired by Indonesian tapestry. It’s fascinating to see how one art form, textiles, migrates into another, created from wax. The works of Bill and Renee make me ponder how we are shaped by images from our youth and the world around us, and, as writers, by genres other than our own.
On another dining room wall is a print by the Argentine artist Carlos Alonso, “Noche Estrellada,” Starry Night, inspired by Van Gogh, with two men around a table on a deep blue starry night. On a trip to Buenos Aires in 2010, on a summer residency with our Spalding writing program, I found the print in a local exhibition. Framed in our home, it speaks of a literary journey, the discovery of a new artist, and a story only partially revealed. Are the two figures, hazily depicted, Van Gogh and Gauguin? The picture heightens my sense of wonder.
The works of four Gulf Coast artists play off one another in our home and create other ties. The first is a pen-and-ink work by New Orleans artist Anastasia Pelias, an abstract couple so entwined their faces merge with each other. I am reminded, passing by, how art can evoke mystery within a sense of familiarity.
The next is a photograph, made with digital finesse by Russell Goodloe, a retired orthodontist from Mobile and a passionate photographer, of an empty bench before a Western backdrop of mountains. Sometimes, before I return to my writing chair, I imagine lingering on that bench, thinking up what I want to write back in my Gulf Coast den. The image helps me relax. It also tells me to let a sense of place envelop us.
Over our piano, where I enjoy sitting and playing blues and pop, is a plein air painting by artist Chris Knight, who lives close by in Fairhope. It evokes the natural setting I see every day and am inspired by—Mobile Bay and surrounding waters. The wind on the bay, the radiant light, the open sky, it’s all here, colorful, concentrated. I want to create language like that, too.
It’s only fitting that close by is a woodcut by the famous Mississippi artist Walter Anderson, a gift from a friend, Karl Hein, after I published my latest novel, “The Promise of the Pelican.” It is also coastal—the image of a pelican. Like a good story, the circle is complete.
Roy Hoffman is the author of six books: the novels The Promise of the Pelican, Come Landfall, Chicken Dreaming Corn, and Almost Family, and the nonfiction Alabama Afternoons and Back Home. He resides with his family in Fairhope, Alabama, and has written for the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Find him at royhoffmanwriter.com.