If a picture speaks a thousand words, how many sentences does it take to paint a picture? Indeed, how do images become story and story image. And what happens when both appear side by side?

The literary/art exhibit "Words and Pictures" toys with these ideas by putting literature with art, not as collaboration but as juxtaposition.

Co-curators Hal Gage and Bruce Farnsworth got the ball rolling by inviting 20 visual artists and 20 writers to participate. They simply asked visual artists to make narrative work, without words or letters, and writers to paint pictures in 250 words or less.

"My idea was always to keep the integrity of each peace intact while exploring the idea of forced serendipity," said Gage, whose book of photography, "Ice," includes a forward by Farnsworth.

Gage and Farnsworth first collected the work and then paired the writing with art via intuitive agreement rather than pre-ordained sets of rules or themes.

"I've always wanted to set up this show so that the two art forms stand alone and fill their own space," Gage continued. "But then we put them in proximity to each other, not necessarily so that they need the other, but to see if something happens in that third eye."

In other words, how will these "accidental connections" create another vision, image, story?

Gage and Farnsworth sounded unsure about how it would pan out last week. The intentionally vague and loose instructions for writers and artists left them with many questions. Should they include artist titles? What font should they use for text? How should they deal with written work coupled with a sculptural piece?

For that matter, what will happen if they end up with a single work left without a partner? Create a trio? Set it off on its own? Leave it mingling with the other pairs?

"The whole thing seems fraught," Farnsworth admitted. "I'm still slightly intimidated by the process. There's still no real ground rules."

WRITING PICTURES

If everything works out as intended, the exhibit -- which opens Friday at the MTS Gallery in Mountain View -- will include 20 visual pieces and 20 written pieces.

Gage selected visual artists based on what he's seen from them before; Farnsworth did much the same while also trying to collect work from a diversity of genres and forms.

"I didn't want to come up with a list of what I think are the 20 best writers," he said, "but I did go for writers whose work I have admired before and who write in a wide variety of genres."

His choices range from former Alaska State Writer Laureate Jerah Chadwick, who recently moved from Unalaska to Minnesota, to emerging poet Joan Kane, who grew up in Muldoon and got her master's of fine arts degree at Columbia University before she moved back to Alaska a few years ago.

Farnsworth discovered Kane's poetry when he heard her read during an event showcasing work by young Alaska Native writers and performers. He immediately asked her to submit her poem, "Stative."

She writes toward image naturally. "Although I tend to work in language, the sonics of a poem, strong imagery is important to my work," she said. "I don't have a real narrative gift, actually I don't have one at all, so I enjoy writing poems that provide another way of entering what can be perceived as a flat landscape."

She said that as an Alaska Native writer, she sees the power of image in oral histories "that are almost outside of language."

Kane works for the Denali Commission and expects her book of poetry -- tentatively titled "Otherwise Sky" -- to get published by NorthShore Press next year.

Her contribution to "Words and Pictures" lacks a cohesive narrative because, she said, "I wanted to represent time passing day into night through a novel image. I wanted to portray a quintessentially Alaskan landscape without exhausting familiar tropes."

PAINTING STORIES

Just as some writers easily craft words into images, many visual artists tell stories effortlessly.

Novelist turned artist Sheary Clough Suiter said using figures in art sets up narrative and prompts viewers "to look at the other shapes and colors and begin to create a story of their own based on the way the juxtaposition of images connects with their own personal history."

Her narrative encaustic painting, "Mixed Messages," depicts the trappings of human life just as many of her paintings and drawings do.

"When I listen to viewers tell me what they see when they look at one of my paintings, even in more abstract pieces, I'm continually amazed and delighted by the interpretive narrative they convey," she said, "and how different that narrative is from one viewer to the next."

Other artists like Kes Woodward paint landscapes populated by trees, not people. The Fairbanks painter said his work "has lately begun to include more overt reference to human presence, passage, and/or perception" via tracks, paths and buildings.

Indeed, "Transfiguration" shows a cluster of trees in winter with a hole of light punched through the branches as if a meteor or something better/worse smashed through the canopy.

The effect creates a sense of time, place and cause-and-effect, as well as something transformative.

Now, exactly how it interacts with written work depends on how Gage and Farnsworth pair things, space things out and talk things through.

"The idea is that each of the artists interprets a set of rules and then we interpret a third thing," Gage said. "I think all the work will stand on its own, all of it good, whether or not we find it easy to pair them up."

Still struggling to imagine how the couplings will work out, Farnsworth added, "The show's not all about us trying to create new narratives, but it will happen. "

Find Dawnell Smith online at adn.com/contact/dsmith or call 257-4587.

WORDS AND PICTURES opens with a Third Friday reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday at the MTS Gallery, 3142 Mountain View Drive. Show continues through Dec. 13. Gallery hours are noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays and 4 to 8 p.m. Wednesdays and Fridays.

KES WOODWARD calls his latest series of paintings "epiphanies" and says they "are about looking directly toward the sun as it blasts its way through the forest, obliterating on its way to my eye, even in winter, the solid mass of trunks and branches. The painting that I sent to the 'Pictures and Words' exhibition is the most dramatic of these, a winter view in which the sun not only beams its way through dense woods, but transfigures the colors and forms of the landscape in and around its path. That's my kind of narrative -- one that someone who is intimately familiar with my work will recognize and understand readily but which for most viewers lends itself to all kinds of speculation as to cause and effect."

SHEARY CLOUGH SUITER says: "I was a writer before I became a visual artist, so my work tends to develop from the same kind of storytelling bias that attracted me to writing fiction in the first place. My paintings often contain figurative elements, which suggest an implied narrative. I think when viewers see a human figure in any form of visual art, they immediately begin to think 'story.' " "STATIVE" by Joan Kane (excerpt)

"STATIVE" By Joan Kane (excerpt)

The bucket of a man pouring water,

A quarterly moon dips low.

Fish slip from the seine: it is time

To depart. As morning nears,

Ursa Major's last light trails.

"LEAVING BISMARCK" by Jerah Chadwick (excerpt)

The way lightning strikes

smolder in buried

pockets of lignite I trace

the river history, Missouri's

wandering seam through the new

map on the airport floor

still in the Badlands, Flare

of capstone, sloughing