Echolocations in paintings and books

Lincolnville Beach, Penobscot Bay, Maine

Painting is echolocation, a method the artist (me) uses to find her place in the universe. Now that I've located myself in the time and space of Lincolnville Beach, what do I do while I'm here? This is a question I've been mulling over for months, unable to come to any sort of conclusion, and perhaps there is no final answer. I send out a question and the answer filters through as I paint. Over a sequence of places and years, I've made paintings about light, color, geological formations, horizons, plants, animals including human ones, and minerals. I understand these phenomena not in terms of scientific measurements and data maps, but as keepers of energy, place holders, guides. I also write and make books.

But how about when the paintings go out into the world? Does a painting change when it leaves the studio? And what if I make a book about what I've found? How do colored shapes act differently from words in a book? Is one form more potent than the other? Leaving aside the question of good art vs bad art, let's just choose from the best of the best, a painting at the top of its game matched to a book of equal quality. Say

Las Meninas and Hamlet
or
Rouen Cathedral and Great Expectations

Their power lies in the unfolding of human nature; the offering of sheer beauty for the eye and ear; an immersion in majesty.

Echoing the original thought, is the artist, painter, writer
-- Witness, documentarian, guide?
-- Keeper, matchmaker, connector?
-- Speaker, communicator with the cosmic flow of energy, able to understand all languages, to shapeshift, to discover/uncover/reveal other ways of being that will keep the fabric of the universe from unraveling?