If art is what, in the words of John Sloan, makes life worth living, then we should do our best to create it, experience it, and sustain it. It is our great pleasure to present in these pages the first five years of visual art published in Chestnut Review. Art has been an important part of the magazine since its founding, and we are proud of the
77 visual artists
who first agreed to have their work published, and here republished, by us. Their images enrich our pages, inspire our imaginations, and feed our emotions.
As we considered how best to celebrate this body of work, however, we realized that simply presenting the art again was insufficient. So we asked a select group of
36 Chestnut staff and friends
to each adopt an art piece and to write a response to it. Thus, every single one of these pieces have inspired unique acts of contemplation and creation. These writers, credited with each piece that they chose, took on this task with a contagious sense of excitement that made all the work to put the volume together worthwhile.
Their responses represent a wide spectrum of genres and sub-genres, from art appreciation prose pieces to poetry, creative nonfiction to short fiction. And each, of course, is a view into the particular writer's engagement with the art that spoke to them. We hope that you'll enjoy spending time with each of these pieces and their corresponding linked writings, and that they may lead you to your own acts of creation.