In her article Something Eternal: AS Byatt and Vincent van Gogh, Sue Sorensen mentions that semiotics in relation to visual images has "a necessary continuum between the domain of speech and writing on one side and the visual on the other.” Regarding van Gogh and his relationship with semiotics, she notes that AS Byatt, a writer influenced by van Gogh, made it clear that van Gogh had the ability not only to paint an object but, in that painting, to explain the object verbally.