Every artist, no matter the medium, has faced a moment where the inspiration just won’t come. Fifteen years ago, writer and book sculptor Jenny O’Grady had one of those moments. “It was a bunch of creatives sitting in a basement at UMBC, and everyone started complaining: ‘I should be painting. I should be writing, I should be doing something,’” she said.
In that moment of collective creative block, O’Grady, now the editor of UMBC Magazine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, traded a poem with visual artist Jim Lord, who gave her one of his drawings. “At the end we’d have something new, which was awesome,” she said. “We felt like we’d got something done.”
What O’Grady and Lord had done were works of ekphrasis, a creative written description of an existing piece of visual art. That early collaboration spawned The Light Ekphrastic, an online quarterly journal that pairs artists across disciplines to create new projects based on each other’s work. Now, some of those creations are part of an exhibit called “The Light Ekphrastic: Creative Spark,” on display at the Howard County Arts Council until Sunday.
What started as a word-of-mouth project among artists in the local community has amassed hundreds of participants from as far as Australia, Japan and Canada. Each prospective artist submits five pieces for review, and O’Grady helps figure out which pairings make sense. “We try to find people who might go well together. It’s like being a matchmaker,” she said.
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Each artist has about six weeks to create their new work. While many of the pairs are strangers, photographer Teresa Duggan and writer Rahne Alexander, both based in Baltimore, knew each other from the local scene. Their collaboration was published in The Light Ekphrastic in February 2022 and is on display at the Howard County exhibit.
Duggan‘s gorgeous shot, “City Sunset,” shows dusk and clouds settling over downtown. It inspired Alexander’s poem, “Twilight For Us All,” which includes the line: “In this sunset light everything looks its best, this golden effulgence that showcases even my dismal little window.”
“She made it better,” Duggan said of the urban scene.
In turn, Duggan was given the poem “What I Want,” comprised of phrases that are “antiquated euphemisms for someone who is queer,” Alexander said. That inspired Duggan’s image, “ISO EEE: A Shadow Girl,” which features a mysterious woman, hat jauntily covering her face, perched on a swing in front of a rowhome door.
Alexander said she connected to the original spark of the project — the need for a creative impulse to catapult you out of stasis. “It’s one of those things artists do. ‘I’m gonna get around to it,’ and you don’t,” she said. “I love collaborating. I love that process of building my work, and getting feedback from another perspective.”
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As a writer who has three chapters of a novel sitting on my laptop that I really need to get to, this sounds like a seed of inspiration to kick me into action. Alexander said she’d heartily recommend that other artists apply to the project. “It’s a great exercise for building community and your own practice,” she said. ”You’re stretching yourself a little bit.”
O’Grady said she’s excited and proud that her own creative stalling inspired so many other people.
“I wasn’t quite sure what would come out of it, but it’s a kick in the butt to get yourself going. You need a deadline,” she said. And the process has made her appreciate her own work even more. “It’s like ‘I didn’t see this in my work, and you saw this thing.’ That’s really good.”
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