Painting grasslands words versus paint Rob Miller

Lancashire Summer 1 revisited

Painting in progress

Rob Miller

"And all this grounded in broad meadows, in motion but silent, the quivering landscape inhabited by anonymous flowers, a shudder of thin straight stalks, carrying their seeds, barely attached to the earth yet tied to its darkest depths. As if the earth were becoming purer as it rises to meet the pure sky, holding out these weightless offerings to it going to meet the rain, their sister.......This was all immediately noted.  Fully aware that I was building up one reality beside another or around it retaining a few of its features but concealing or distorting others and because of that I was discouraged from the start. Admitting to myself now and then that the very word grass or better still grassland was more expansive than this seeking for words which run the constant risk of preciosity" Green yes-but neither dark nor light, scarcely a colour at all, less distinct, more effaced or hidden than the green of trees"

Phillippe  Jaccottet May  http://jaccottet.free.fr/bibliojaccottet.htm

This quotation from Jaccottets poem 'May', says it all for me about a landscape of grasslands; such is the nature of the Pennine meadows close to my home; places that I have stood silent in and studied, places that I have walked in and through and most of all places that I have drawn and painted; grasses of light sometimes lighter than the sky itself, I painted them, after a long process of finding the right marks to make on my canvas or paper, painted  as thin washes  layers of paint scratched into, stripped dripped and rubbed simplifying them to find the essence of their nature, Jaccottet does the same simplifying and reducing what he sees and experiences, tuning his carefully chosen words to hum at the same decibels as the grass blown in the wind,  

Are words better than images or mark making, at describing figurative things, beauty, awe, or emotional responses to them, is there an advantage of poetry over paint, a poem can be on many levels in many verses each being laid bare as it is read,  can a painting a painting do the same,