"People don't see the world before their eyes until it's put in a narrative mode." Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, by H.Porter Abbott (6) I have been exploring connections beween artistic and textual modes. I am excited by an independent study that I am planning which challenges my undergraduate students in short narrative to create a visualization based on the text of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The student visual interpretations will be based strictly upon the text. I am interested in the tendency of some writers to demonstrate "painterly" tendencies in their descriptive passages. I also recognize the tendency of many painters to render narratives in their work, in particular, I think of Degas' Absinthe Drinker. I have used that painting in creative writing class, asking students to provide the story line. The woman's posture shows a story within the image. One of my professors says that that painting, emerging from the impressionist period, denies the attachment of a narrative, but the audiences I have encountered (the student writers) disagree, providing, with ease, a story line.