Category Archives: Paintings

Sonnet 5: Flowers distilled

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Sonnet 5: Flowers distilled

Sonnet 5: Flowers distilled. 20″x20″. Oil on linen. 2012.

Those 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.

 

Click here to listen to Jemma Redgrave reading this sonnet.

One theory about Shakespeare sonnets is that the sequence started as a commission, in which the poet was engaged by someone to convince his young patron to marry and procreate, a topic which didn’t really touch Shakespeare on a personal level at the time. As the sequence progresses, two things begin to happen: the speaker’s love of the young man becomes more and more personal, passionate, and urgent; and he gradually gives up the idea of replicating his beloved through procreation. What takes its place is the idea much more significant to Shakespeare, and to his readers as well: the eternalizing power of art, more specifically, of his own poetry.

The fifth sonnet is the first time in the sequence where this idea is hinted at – it will disappear again in the next one, for some time, to return, much more explicitly and powerfully, later on. Here, what is suggested as a strategy against the winter of old age and death which inevitably destroys the beauty of summer is distillation. Shakespeare may seem simply to explore one more metaphor of procreation, but the process of making flowers into perfume – to be pent in walls of glass – creates something so essentially different from the original, that this metaphor leads him to a totally new meaning. After all, what the speaker was worrying about earlier in the sequence was preservation of the young man’s beauty (“show”); here, there is no hope of saving the “show”, only the “substance” may survive the coming winter.

In my series, the art of poetry and eternalizing power of language must needs be replaced with the art of painting and eternalizing power of colour, and this is the first painting which begins to play with this concept. The major challenge posed by this aspect of translation is, of course, the opposition between “show” and “substance”: in the obvious sense, a painting is always about the “show” (as Shakespeare himself would remind us repeatedly later in the sequence).

For this first instance of Shakespeare’s engagement with this opposition, I chose to translate the loss of “show” as the loss of colour, contrasting the left vertical golden section rectangle, with it’s fully saturated colour harmony, 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.

The painting uses Shakespeare’s mention of frame in the first quatrain to introduce the “frame within frame” device, which transforms the canvas from just a depiction of flowers into an image aware of its being a painting. The internal, slanted, frame is ambiguous between two readings: It may be the frame of the painting – so that the painting represents both flowers themselves and a floral painting being painted (flowers distilled), or it may be the frame of a mirror in which real flowers are reflected, thus playing on Shakespeare’s original metaphor of their substance pent in walls of glass.

Sonnet 4: Thy unused beauty

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Sonnet 4. Thy unused beauty

Sonnet 4. Thy unused beauty. 20"20", oil on linen. February 2012

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tomb’d with thee,
Which, used, lives th’ executor to be.

One interesting thing about this project is how the process of translating a poem into a painting varies from sonnet to sonnet. This one wouldn’t not let me alone for several sleepless hours of night before the image emerged with nearly complete clarity; next day, I had just to transfer it to the canvas.

Although the sonnet is obviously meant to continue the theme of procreation, its semantics suggests the possibility of a broader interpretation: the uselessness and ultimate deadliness of not giving in general, not returning to the world (“Nature”) what was “lent” to one to give further. So the image is a figure curled into itself — somewhat ambiguous between “having traffic with thyself alone” and a posture of deep despair which comes from being disconnected from the world.

On the pictorial level, I also tried to make the figure ambiguous between being three-dimensional, “realistically” integrated into its environment, and disconnected from it: so, for example, in some places the edges are treated softly, as though the figure is part of the outside world – whereas some other edges are decoratively hard, suggesting that the figure is “cut out” and flat, as though it doesn’t belong to the landscape at all. Similarly, although the colour treatment of the figure more or less keeps with realistic flesh tones, it is considerably “poorer” in colour compared to the wild dance of the colour wheel around it, in which it doesn’t take any part.

Sonnet 3. Thou art thy mother’s glass

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Sonnet 3. Thou art thy mother's glass

Sonnet 3. Thou art thy mother's glass. 20"x20", oil on linen.

Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime:
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
But if thou live remember’d not to be
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

Click here to watch and hear Simon Callow reading the sonnet.

Edouard_Manet,_A_Bar_at_the_Folies-Bergere

Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. 96 x 130 cm, oil on canvas. 1881-1882.

This painting is the most straightforwardly an “illustration” of the sonnet of all I’ve done so far, perhaps because it invokes a human image which directly appeals to my own sensibilities – the image of a mother who looks at her son as a mixture of a mirror and a time machine. The scene, as depicted, vaguely suggests identification between the viewer and the mother (reflected in the mirror from which the young man turned away). In this sense, the painting borrows its motive and its overall conceptual structure from Eduard Manet’s last unfinished painting, in which a large mirror behind the girl’s back reflects a man talking to her – be it the viewer or someone she thinks of.

Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, 1594.

Nicholas Hilliard. Henry Wriothesley, 1594.

I was briefly tempted to go with the current historical near-consensus with regard to the identity of the young man to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets might have been addressed – and integrate into the painting, in one way or another, the likeness of Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton. Yet if this really is Shakespeare’s character and addressee, than he was probably right when he wrote, repeatedly, that his verbal depiction of the young man’s beauty is more impressive and capable of making it eternal than any paintings of contemporary artists.  Be it as it may, this image doesn’t inspire my imagination, so I decided to borrow another character from roughly the same time.

 

Titian. Man with a glove.

Titian. Man with a glove. C. 1520. Oil on canvas. 100 x 89 cm.

“My” young man, therefore, comes from Titian’s “Man with a glove”. I did not wish for the character of my painting to be a “copy” of Titian’s in any sense, but rather to be recognizably the same man – one of the most iconic images of Renaissance young and beautiful nobleman in the history of art.

In combining two “sources” from so different chapters in art history – the late nineteenth century impressionism and the height of Italian Renaissance, this painting opened a new path in my work with the sonnets, in which great paintings of the past realigned and rearranged themselves before my sight, suggesting themselves as visual counterparts of Shakespeare’s poetry, creating perceptible impression of a great ocean of art in which waves don’t really care about differences between art forms.

Geometrically, the double portrait reverses the structure of two earlier landscapes, putting the golden section vertical (interpreted as the edge of the mirror) on the left, behind the young man, whereas the less prominent lower horizontal is suggested by his shoulders, dissolving into darkness at the bottom right. This creates the smaller square in the right top corner of the picture plane, which coincides with the mother’s portrait.

In terms of colour, the painting runs away with Shakespeare’s mention of “golden” time: it plays on the contrast between a range of yellows and ochres and (mostly French Ultramarine) blues, set off by touches of red and the colder and brighter whites, linking together the two portraits with a more curvy movement.

Sonnet 2: Forty winters

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Sonnet 2. Forty winters

Sonnet 2. Forty winters. 20"x20". Oil on linen. 2012.

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask’d where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

The landscape follows the overall geometry of the previous one, with the horizon line at the golden section, and the foreground tree supporting the golden section vertical on the right.

Vincent Van Gogh. "View of Arles with Trees in Blossom" (1988).

Vincent Van Gogh. "View of Arles with Trees in Blossom" (1988).

The motive for this landscape was loosely inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s “View of Arles with Trees in Blossom” (1988), with an older bare tree in the foreground set against a blooming background. In the sonnet, the future winter (or even forty of them) is juxtaposed to a possible future spring/youth (in the person of the addressee’s possible child), yet both are contrasted to the implied present (when the addressee himself is young and blooming). Van Gogh’s motive provided the needed contrast between the old and the new, and the potential for ambiguity between the winter and the spring.

The central image of the poem integrated into the landscape is the deep trenches in thy beauty’s field, which separates the wintery, “old age” foreground from the youthful, springtime background, but also defines the overall inevitable movement from the foreground to the distant background – yet the field is painted in such a way, texture-wise, as to defy the implied perspective and allow for optical ambiguity between the “spring” background being faraway or on the same plane as the old tree. At the same time, the branches of the old tree strive to establish a link between the two.

The core of this attempt at a translation, however, lies in colour, playing at the possibility of seeing something “warm” while feeling it “cold” (in the couplet of the poem): the dominant colours are cold but they are used to set off the vibration between colder and warmer hues. Although the warm colours can be seen, they do not change the feel of coldness.

 

Sonnet 1: “Thyself thy foe”

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Sonnet 1. Thyself thy foe

Lena Levin. Thyself thy foe. 20"x20" (50.8 x 50.8 cm), oil on linen, 2012

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

This is the opening sonnet of the whole sequence, and the opening sonnet of the smaller “procreation” sub-sequence (1-17), in which the speaker of the sonnet plays the role of a “fatherly” figure, trying to persuade the young man being addressed to marry and procreate – and thus to ensure whatever immortality is accessible in this world. I am not genuinely interested in anti-childfree rhetoric as such, which means that content-wise, I rather focus on the accompanying themes invoked; even more so, I am interested in rhythms, composition, esthetics of the language – and how it may translate into the (modern) language of color.

The overall motive of the painting is due to the momentarily invoked reference to the injunction to increase and multiply in Genesis, that is, to the Garden of Eden. Hence the painting represents, more or less, a garden. Yet this garden is not really the garden of Eden – it is subverted by the refusal to procreate, described in the sonnet in terms of two conflicting metaphors – one is a flame/candle, and the other is a rose bud. So, the greens and blues of my landscape and the sky above it are subverted by reds and oranges.

The painting follows the overall design scheme I’ve decided to use to “represent” the structure of a sonnet: the composition is defined by a horizontal and a vertical at golden sections; here, the horizontal (the horizon line) is more prominent than the vertical, but the vertical is there, suggested by the possible pass through the mountains and by the location of the furthest bush/rose bud in the spiral.

Within this general structure, this sonnet follows a more specific compositional scheme: the first quatrain presents a calm, rather cold, overall description of the desirable state of affairs, which represents a human’s possible path to the distant future; the second and the third quatrains, much more urgent and nervous, enact the young man’s refusal to follow this path in two ways, both associated with (generalized) red. The fire, which makes a famine instead of abundance, and the bud, which refuses to open, “contracted” to itself.

In my painting, the first quatrain is loosely referenced by the grand diagonal curvy movement of colder and calmer colours from the bottom left to the remnants of blue in the sky, through the narrow pass in the distant mountains. The fire — the self-substantial flame – burns out the sky; and the bud that refuses to open is represented by the ambiguous spiral of rose bushes on the right, which look, due to their colour, increasingly like roses – and culminating the spiral in the distant bud, shown against the darkest spot in the background. In contrast to the green curve, which does find its way into the sky, the “rose” curve stops short of it, contracts into itself – instead of reaching the furthest distance.



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