Exchanging Hats: Paintings

Thought not many people know it, Elizabeth Bishop painted throughout her life, as this handsome book, reproducing in full color forty of her watercolors, demonstrates. Benton gives the provenance, dimensions, and (where possible) the date of each painting; he also cites painterly passages from Bishop's writing.\nAmazon.com Review\nElizabeth Bishop was a great poet. It turns out that she was also a rather good painter, even though she insisted that her paintings were anything but art. Her visual creations offer intimate and unexpected insights into the magic of familiar places and beloved friends.
Exchanging Hats provides both veteran Bishop admirers and those meeting her for the first time with an extraordinary examination of her paintings and drawings.\nFrom Publishers Weekly\nIt is not widely known that the poet Elizabeth Bishop was also a painter. "From time to time I paint a small gouache or watercolor and give them to friends. They are Not Art?NOT AT ALL," she declared in 1971. Exchanging Hats collects 30 of Bishop's modest, graceful, sometimes primitive images of friends, flowers, landscapes, buildings and domestic interiors, edited and introduced by poet William Benton and accompanied by short, painterly excerpts from Bishop's prose writings on art and poetry.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.\nFrom Booklist\nNo one familiar with Bishop's exquisite, keenly visual poetry will be surprised to learn that the poet was also a painter. Terribly modest about her great talent, Bishop didn't flaunt her passion for painting, which was, after all, a private pursuit, but she did give her watercolors to close friends, and several of her works have graced the covers of her books. Poet William Benton tracked down Bishop's watercolors for a posthumous exhibition (the first ever), and he describes his amusing adventures in a vibrant and affectionate introduction. He writes, "If Bishop wrote like a painter, she painted like a writer," a remark referring, in part, to the diminutiveness of her work, but also to the effortless perspicaciousness of Bishop's renderings. Her luminous and animated pictures of flowers and buildings possess a quirky charm, and there is much more going on than first meets the eye. Happily enough, selections of Bishop's short prose pieces round out this lovely volume.
Donna Seaman