When I was in college at UGA, I was only a few classes away from completing a second major in Comparative Literature. My degree ultimately remained in journalism and magazines, but Comparative Literature became one of the most influential parts of my education.
I took every Comparative Literature course I could fit into my schedule. Children’s Literature, Literature and Cinema, Chinese Literature and Film, Literature and Medicine, Myth and Oral Tradition, Modernism and Postmodernism, Literature and Philosophy, Romantic European Literature, Jewish Literature, World Literature. Looking back, I realize that those classes shaped the way I think about stories, art, and creativity more than almost anything else.
What I loved most about Comparative Literature was that it was never really about studying a single book.
It was about studying connections.
We examined how the same ideas travel across cultures, languages, centuries, and artistic forms. A theme might begin in a poem, reappear in a novel, find new expression in a film, and then emerge again in a painting, sculpture, dance performance, or piece of music. The story changed, but the underlying ideas endured.
One of my favorite papers I wrote compared Peter Pan to Dante’s Inferno. At first glance, the two works seem completely unrelated. One is a beloved children’s story and the other is a medieval epic poem about the afterlife. Yet the more closely I looked, the more parallels I found. Peter guides the Darling children through a series of encounters that resemble a journey through different levels of an afterlife. Captain Hook functions as a devil-like figure waiting at the end of that journey. Peter Pan, like Virgil, a guide. Whether intentional or not, the comparison revealed how stories often echo one another across centuries.
Another concept that fascinated me was intertextuality.
Intertextuality is the idea that no story exists in complete isolation. Every text is influenced by other texts that came before it, and every reader brings memories of other stories into the reading experience. Meaning is created not only by the author but also by the connections we make.
I even wrote about this concept through an unexpected example: Family Guy. Much of its humor depends on references, allusions, and shared cultural knowledge. The show assumes that viewers recognize the stories, films, and ideas being referenced. Without those connections, many of the jokes simply would not work.
The same principle appears throughout art history.
Rodin’s The Gates of Hell was directly inspired by Dante’s Inferno. The sculpture becomes richer when viewed alongside the literary work that influenced it. The literature informs the art, and the art invites us back to the literature.
For years, I thought these ideas belonged to my academic life.
Then I started painting.
When I began creating my Literary Art Series, I realized I was returning to many of the same questions that fascinated me in those classes.
Why do certain images stay with us long after we finish a book?
Why do we remember a green light, a button, a rose, a hallway, or a pair of shoes?
Why do some objects come to represent an entire story?
My paintings rarely depict characters or scenes. Instead, they focus on symbolism. The button from Coraline. The green light from The Great Gatsby. The rose from The Picture of Dorian Gray. The hallway and carpet from The Shining. Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. The yellow wallpaper itself.
These objects carry meaning beyond their physical form. They become shorthand for larger ideas: identity, obsession, hope, temptation, childhood, fear, freedom, memory.
Without the stories, the paintings would not exist.
In that sense, every piece in the Literary Art Series is intertextual. Each painting exists in conversation with the book that inspired it. The artwork depends on the story, while the story gives additional meaning to the artwork.
What I find most rewarding is that viewers often bring their own experiences to the paintings. Someone who has never read Coraline may simply see a button and a strand of red thread. Someone who knows the story immediately sees something else entirely. The meaning expands through the viewer’s relationship with the text.
Years ago, I studied how literature becomes film, how stories become sculpture, and how ideas move across artistic forms.
Today, I find myself participating in that same process.
The books I loved became symbols. The symbols became paintings. The paintings become part of an ongoing conversation that began long before I picked up a paintbrush.
Comparative Literature taught me that stories are never truly isolated. They continue to evolve as they move through different mediums, different cultures, and different generations.
My Literary Art Series is simply my contribution to that conversation.
