Sonnet 5: Flowers distilledThose hours, that with gentle work did frame The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell, Will play the tyrants to the very same And that unfair which fairly doth excel: For never-resting time leads summer on To hideous winter and confounds him there; Sap check'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone, Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness every where: Then, were not summer's distillation left, A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass, Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft, Nor it nor no remembrance what it was: But flowers distilled though they with winter meet, Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.William Shakespeare |
June 2015 |
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The painting translates the loss of show as the loss of colour, contrasting the left vertical golden section rectangle, with it’s fully saturated colour, and the right third of the painting, in which some muted ochres remain only in the background, and flowers themselves leese their colour (and lose their lusty leaves) and retain only their basic geometry. On another level, this loss of colour can be read as flowers being checked with frost, oversnowed – thus bringing in the second, wintery, quatrain of the sonnet. This painting is a work-in-progress. |
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