There is an ancient tradition of describing — or inventing — works of art in poetry. For millennia, people have imagined the Shield of Achilles, lavishly described in Homer’s Iliad, or marvelled at a tapestry in a poem by Catullus that details the story of Theseus abandoning Ariadne.

Creating images or artworks in words is called “ekphrasis,” and it takes advantage of the way words can exceed the static images of an artwork. Homer’s Shield of Achilles is impossibly huge; it contains everything, including labourers picking grapes, armies marching, peasants dancing. Only words can render it.

The exhibition presents sea- and lake-scapes which use the horizon to organize concentrations of colour. The gentle blue-greens of sky and lake appear in the distance.

On display every weekend this month at the Royal Hotel Annex is a reversed version of this tradition. The Power of Water is a collection of paintings by Karole Marois that takes on the lake, its refusal to be fixed.  It is like what Catullus says of a desiring lover’s words, in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua: they should be written on the wind and running water.

Accompanying the paintings are poems by two local poets, Lindsay Brant and JC Sulzenko, whose writing appears in black and white on the walls between the paintings — reversing the traditional ekphrastic direction, turning words into physical art objects. These are explicitly offered as visual relief between the paintings. As Ms. Sulzenko explains, “Karole wanted to have a couple of poems to slow people down as they walk around, to give them a chance to think about the paintings in a different way.” The poems are all water-themed, some specifically in response to the paintings they accompany.

The power of water is captured in Lindsay Brant’s “Vast Vulnerability”:

there is beauty
in the telling
the breaking of waves
along the shore
but there is wisdom
in the riptide
in the calm
in the storm

The waves themselves become an utterance, a “telling,” in the poem.

This exhibition presents broad sea- and lake-scapes which use the horizon to organize concentrations of colour that from a distance appear to have the gentle blue-greens of sky and lake. A closer look suggests something darker under the surface.

Ms. Marois describes her process: “I usually start with a wash of orange colour to cover my primed canvas or wood panel. Because I work with a lot of blue and cool colours, the orange tint helps to warm up the painting. You will see some of the bits of sienna or yellow-orange appear throughout the painting.

“The horizon line creates balance in the composition, something I tend to look for. I usually start the painting with the sky, working my way down, to establish the mood with colour and rhythm. Then it is a dance of back and forth, far away and close, trying to create perspective.  I am not looking for realism. I am more interested in expressing feeling or idea, and connecting with the viewer.”

The scenes are of daylight, but feature grey skies, or white clouds over blue. Some paintings introduce a human element, but only tentatively. Figures stand between the viewer and the water, but they are ghostly outlines. We see through them. Unlike many a “nature painting,” this is not so much “the figure in the landscape,” as “the figure is the landscape.”

JC Sulzenko’s response to one such painting presses the question:

     Half-alive, half-dead. I think, but do not ask, what if I wasn’t here?
What would you see without my shape, without my shadow in the frame?
    Without my voice, would you still hear the ocean call to you as I did?

This ethereal quality is most haunting in Ms. Marois’ lakescape, “All is One,” which features the half-present figures of seven children, sitting in a row on the shore, gazing across the lake at a distant arc of geese soon to disappear. The only permanent thing, of course, is the lake, its ever-changing waves rolling in.