Sonnet 19: For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men (re-work)

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Lena Levin

Lena Levin. Sonnet 19: For beauty's pattern to succeding men

Lena Levin. Sonnet 19: For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men. 20″x20″. Oil on linen

William Shakespeare. Sonnet 19

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O! carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Patrick Stewart reading this sonnet

This is the first post of this kind, but I have no doubt there will be more on this long journey: a re-work of an already posted sonnet painting. This is the way I generally work, after all: there are many paintings that seem complete in the process and some time afterwards, but then just call for a change.

Here, the color scheme was way too balanced for the powerful rhythms of the sonnet, and, in some places, the concept and structure of the painting was weakened by my hesitations about how strongly it should be linked to David. In the re-work, I suppressed the yellows and allowed the devouring time a freer reign in the picture plane.

Sonnet 24: Mine eye hath played a painter

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Lena Levin

Sonnet 24: Mine eye hath played a painter. 20″x20″. Oil on linen. 2012

William Shakespeare. Sonnet 24

Mine eye hath played the painter and hath steeled,
Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein ’tis held,
And perspective that is best painter’s art.

For through the painter must you see his skill,
To find where your true image pictured lies,
Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes.

Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:
Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, where-through the sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee;

Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art,
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

Prasanna Puwanarajah reading this sonnet.

This translation goes directly to the all-too familiar image, accessible when one gets through all syntactic twists and turns of perspective in the sonnet: two lovers looking into into one another’s eyes, to gaze therein on themselves – reflected in the other person’s eye, of course, but also, hopefully, steeled in table of their heart.

I wanted the plane surrounding the eye-painter in my painting to be both distinctly representational, reminiscent of a human face, but also, abstractly and geometrically, mirroring twists, turns, and fluid metaphors with which Shakespeare both creates and partly hides this image.

For a time, I was tempted by the idea of painting a visible reflection of the other person in the eye, but then decided against this all too straightforward approach, for two reasons. First, the power of a lyric poem lies in the ability of the reader to identify both with the speaker, by actually speaking the words, and with the addressee, by listening to them. Leaving the suggested reflection vague, indistinct allows the viewer to identify with the person looking into the eye, recalling their own moments like this and imagining their own reflection there. But more importantly, the invisibility of reflection is linked to the open question of the couplet: what’s in the heart? We know not – we don’t see it.

Sonnet 21: A couplement of proud compare

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Lena Levin

Sonnet 21: A couplement of proud compare. 20″x20″. Oil on linen. 2012.

William Shakespeare. Sonnet 21

So is it not with me as with that Muse
Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,

Making a couplement of proud compare,
With sun and moon, with earth and sea’s rich gems,
With April’s first-born flowers, and all things rare
That heaven’s air in this huge rondure hems.

O let me, true in love, but truly write,
And then believe me, my love is as fair
As any mother’s child, though not so bright
As those gold candles fixed in heaven’s air:

Let them say more that like of hearsay well;
I will not praise that purpose not to sell.

Tunji Kasim reading this sonnet

This is a sonnet about poetry, and so my painting is about painting.

The sonnet contrasts two kinds of poetry, the true and authentic poetry inspired by love, vs. the false and exaggerated poetry based on hearsay. True to himself, Shakespeare enacts poetry of the latter kind within the sonnet and then “corrects” it; this juxtaposition is highlighted by repetition of rhyme-words and rhyme-sounds of poem-within-poem in the “real” poem (in violation of general rules of Italian sonnet righting [Vendler 1997: 131]). So the overall concept of this translation into painting was rather straightforward: there had to be a contrast between the painting and a painting-within-painting.

Lena Levin. Unbearable strangeness. 12″x12″. Oil on linen panel. 2012

My first approach to this idea involved a juxtaposition of three stylistic versions of approximately the same still-life set up (with a nearly hidden internal reference to a painting of Adriaen Coorte’s. This sketch (now called “Unbearable strangeness) is shown on the left. It didn’t quite work.

To begin with, while concentrating on the contrast between how things are compared by different Muses, I’ve lost the contrast between what they are compared with, essential in the sonnet: the false poetry compares love and beloved with every fair and rare thing on earth and in heaven, the true poetry remains on the earthly level of humanity (any mother’s child). Secondly, I have lost the key (word) of heaven (repeated in every quatrain of the sonnet) as the ultimate standard of comparison, both in the colour harmony and in the (lack of) vertical movement within the “real” areas of the picture plane. It also turned out that repeating the same set-up in a painting-within-painting creates an ambiguity between a painting and a mirror, which doesn’t align with the poem’s meaning.

Therefore, the final painting approaches the same idea in a different way. Most importantly, there is now heaven with gold candles in its air instead of one of still-life versions: it opens up this “chamber” painting into a larger universe and defines both the vertical dimension of the painting and its overall color harmony.

Willem Kalf. Still life with silver jug. 73,8 x 65,2 cm. Oil on canvas. 1655-57

Secondly, the subject matter of the “real” still life and of the painting-within-painting is now different: the real one, with bread and onions is decidedly more earthly, the “painted” one, with its lemons, silver and china, more exotic and “fine” (rare and fair). I did, however, retain one common element, the wine glass, for the sake of purely stylistic contrast and to acknowledge the repetition of rhymes in the sonnet.

There is another important difference as well: in the first study above, all three versions of the still life were done from life; here, the painting-within-painting is borrowed from several still life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age (I show here the one most explicitly referred to in my work, by Willem Kalf). This introduces the visual counterpart of “hearsay” in the poem: the rival poets don’t invent their hyperbolic comparisons themselves, but borrow them from others (stirred by a painted beauty).

There are two other, purely visual, contrasts between the two still life areas:

Geometrically, the painting-within-painting is a vertical plane (corresponding to “vertical” metaphors condemned in the sonnet), whereas the “real life” set-up is horizontal, earth-bound, almost falling out of the picture plane towards the viewer;
Colour-wise, the painting-within-painting borrows its colour harmony from the heaven area and intensifies it as far as possible, that is, heaven itself for ornament doth use. In contrast to this, the real-life area of the painting is saturated with earthly reds and ochres.

All in all, it turned out that a humble still life can offer ample opportunities for creating visual counterparts for a poetic commentary on poetry.

References:
Helen Vendler. The Art of Shakespeare Sonnets. Cambridge, Massachusetts &ndahs; London, England. 1997.

Sonnet 20: All hues in his controlling

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Lena Levin

Lena Levin. Sonnet 20: All hues in his controlling. 20″x20″. Oil on linen. 2012

William Shakespeare. Sonnet 20

A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion.
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.

Simon Russel Beale reading this sonnet

This sonnet is a remarkable combination of playfulness and despondency. On the one hand, it jokingly plays around the impossible conceit of Nature pricking out someone who was originally designed as a woman because she fell in love with the person and wanted them for her own pleasure. On the other, it talks of what is construed as an insurmountable barrier, an ever-present distance between the speaker of the sonnet and his beloved.

As a painter, my attention focused on the somewhat mysterious idea of all hues in his controlling, which suggested that the painting should play around “all hues”, that is, all colors of rainbow. This is really a case of strange serendipity, I thought, because this sonnet, for obvious reasons, is at the centre of debate on Shakespeare’s “real” sexual orientation; yet the association between the acceptance of all sexual orientations and the symbol of rainbow certainly belongs to our times, not to Shakespeare’s. And yet he does mention “all hues”, without any clear reason. Building the painting around a rainbow also conveys the feeling of insurmountable distance, impossibility of real closeness, accentuated by the water barrier between the viewer and the rainbow with all its hues.

Bringing together and controlling all hues with equal, or nearly equal, intensity is not an easy challenge for a painter. Here, I tried to carry this idea further than just a rainbow – splitting the colors into multiple hues in almost every single area of the canvas, pushing it to the same level of playful absurdity as the original conceit of the poem.

Sonnet 19: For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Lena Levin

Sonnet 19: For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men. 20″x20″ (50.8 x 50.8 cm). Oil on linen. 2012.

William Shakespeare. Sonnet 19

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O! carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Patrick Stewart reading this sonnet

The reference point for this translation is, of course, Michelangelo’s David – the image inevitably suggested by the very concept of “beauty’s pattern to succeeding men”, by the mention of carving, and, last but not least, by the powerful, truly timeless, rhythm of the third quatrain.

In the painting, David is imbued with the warmth of life absent from the marble, but subjected to destructive red brushstrokes of devouring time. Both are contrasted to the blue movement emanating from his sling, the eternal symbol of seemingly impossible victory, this time, against the fierce Goliath of time.

Sonnet 17: Stretched metre of an antique song

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Lena Levin

Sonnet 17: Stretched metre of an antique song. 20″x20″ (50.8 x 50.8 cm). Oil on linen.

William Shakespeare. Sonnet 17

Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say ‘This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’
So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage
And stretched metre of an antique song:

But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice, in it, and in my rhyme.

Diana Quick reading this sonnet.

Domenico Ghirlandaio. Piero di Lorenzo de Medici.

For this work, I needed an “antique” painting to stand for the antique song of the sonnet: something not quite believable and somewhat stretched technically, and maybe even yellowed with age.

Since the Early Renaissance would certainly be somewhat “antique” for the future envisioned by Shakespeare, this painting loosely references Domenico Ghirlandaio’s portrait of Piero, the eldest son of Lorenzo de Medici. On the one hand, we don’t quite believe this depiction: the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent had in all probability been somewhat idealized by the artist, albeit for reasons quite different from Shakespeare’s. On the other hand, this portrait has that exact mixture of realism with the stylistic imprint of its time that I needed for a translation of this sonnet: it’s straightforward and somewhat naive colour harmony, elongated face with visible stylistic residues of the Florentine tradition to insert portraits of patrons into religious paintings.

In many ways, these qualities are exaggerated in my work, which adds to the young man’s face more of those heavenly touches we are not supposed to believe. I have wiped away Piero’s arrogance and his (realistic) heavy chin and enlarged the eyes to an unrealistic degree, making them more “in-your-face” beautiful and considerably more romantic and hard to believe.

The right vertical golden rectangle of my square design is supposed to stand for the depiction of the past surviving into the future, with its flatter and smoother colour areas and straightforward contrast of primary colours and black. The left third of the square, where the colours split into a chaotic vertical movement of brushstrokes, stands for the envisioned future with its doubts and scorn. The portrait of the young man, however, doesn’t quite fit into the past, but comes out from the painting-within-painting into the “future”, which allows the future’s split colours and untamed brushstrokes to burst into his perfect hair-do. Is it the future’s scorn? Or repercussions of Shakespeare’s success in his quest to make the young man immortal with his verse? Who knows…

Sonnet 13: Against the stormy gusts of winter day // and barren rage of death’s eternal cold

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Lena Levin

Sonnet 13: Against the stormy gusts of winter day and barren rage of death’s eternal cold. 20″x20″. Oil on linen. 2012

O, that you were yourself! but, love, you are
No longer yours than you yourself here live:
Against this coming end you should prepare,
And your sweet semblance to some other give.
So should that beauty which you hold in lease
Find no determination: then you were
Yourself again after yourself’s decease,
When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.
Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honour might uphold
Against the stormy gusts of winter’s day
And barren rage of death’s eternal cold?

O, none but unthrifts! Dear my love, you know
You had a father: let your son say so.

William Shakespeare. Sonnet 13

Stephen Greenblatt writes, in his book “Will in the World” (W. W. Norton & Compan, 2004), about sonnet writing as a “sophisticated game of courtiers” (p. 234), which became fashionable in the reign of Henry VIII and was perfected in the reign of Elizabeth.

“The challenge of the game,” he says, “was to sound as intimate, self-revealing and emotionally vulnerable as possible, without actually disclosing anything compromising to anyone outside the innermost circle.” (ibid.) The further a reader is removed from the writer and the addressee of a sonnet, the more vague and incomprehensible references to any specific characters or facts must be.

This is the tradition I claim for this painting, and so this story is very short. The sonnet, I feel, achieves one the first powerful emotional peaks in the sequence, especially in the lines which I chose as the title for the painting; and this painting draws on deeply personal references, which don’t really need to be revealed explicitly. They will be recognized by my “innermost circle”, but not beyond.

Sonnet 12: All silvered over with white

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Lena Levin

Sonnet 12: All silvered over with white. 20″x20″. Oil on linen. 2012

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defense
Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence.

William Shakespeare. Sonnet 12

Click here to listen to David Tennant reading this sonnet.

In this first “procreation” sub-sequence of his sonnets sequence, Shakespeare often invokes a kind of double vision, “double exposure” in modern terms.

Most often, the speaker of the sonnets looks at something blooming and green, but sees, simultaneously or instead, its future decay. Here, this double vision is reversed, in the way both more optimistic – despite the mournful couplet – and closer to my own world view: he looks at things past prime, at a wintery landscape, yet keeps in his mind’s eye their greener beauty and former glory.

I love this poem – the rhythm of its first lines sounding exactly like the clock that tells the time, and its clearly defined colour harmony: violets and greens all silvered over with white. On the surface of it, the “silvered over with white” attribute applies to sable curls only, but an attempt to translate the poem into painting reveals its more general meaning, merging the silvery streaks in one’s aging hair with snow covering summer greens.

Chabot park . 20″×16″. Oil on canvas panel. 2010.

The poem connected itself in my mind with my own visual experience, recorded earlier in an en plein air study from Chabot park, on a day both green and rainy. The rhythm of time, in this painting, is identified with the diagonal rhythms of the hills, with a road going into the distance, sometimes disappearing behind the hills; the visual link is motivated by the swing of the pendulum.

I changed the composition slightly, moving the violets around, silvering my greens all over with white, and making the trees more ambiguous as to whether they have lusty leaves or are barren of them; trying, in sum, to see the landscape with Shakespeare’s eye, which could see a summer and a winter, the beauty and the decay, at the same time.

Sonnet 11: She carved thee for her seal

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Lena Levin

Sonnet 11: She carved thee for her seal. 20"x20". Oil on linen. 2012

William Shakespeare. Sonnet 11:

As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou growest
In one of thine, from that which thou departest;
And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st
Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.
Herein lives wisdom, beauty and increase:
Without this, folly, age and cold decay:
If all were minded so, the times should cease
And threescore year would make the world away.
Let those whom Nature hath not made for store,
Harsh, featureless and rude, barrenly perish:
Look whom she best endow’d she gave the more,
Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:

She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby
Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.

The poem is designed as several overlapping waves of waning and growing, decrease and increase, which enact rhythmically the interplay of its semantic contrasts:

waning vs. growth as a part of natural current of life,
wisdom and increase within this natural movement vs. folly and decay without,
beautiful, best endowed creatures, made “for store” vs. harsh and featureless ones, to remain barren.

The painting chooses its subject matter to match the basic organic metaphor of the poem, and translates the poem’s rhythms into three visual oppositions:

the interplay of organic upward and downward movements within the lighter diamond-like shape;
the general movement of the lightest plane of this shape upward and (nearly) away from the picture plane, into the distant future is opposed to the harsher, decaying forms outside the diamond, directed downwards, towards the bottom edge of the canvas.
the diamond-like plane of “wisdom and beauty” is filled with both lighter and more saturated, intense colours, set against the muted, darker tones outside it.

By the end of the poem, Shakespeare introduces another, inorganic metaphor for replication, the metaphor of printing/copying (which has the advantage of not implying any “waning” of the “seal”). Although this concept is subsumed within the repetitive rhythms of the major, organic, one, it is enacted in minor repetitions (“copies”) within the last lines of the sonnet: gave/gift, bounteous/bounty etc., as though the poem begins to print itself (this observation is due to Helen Vendler’s commentary).

This formal device is transferred to the painting in two ways: the juxtaposition of organic and inorganic metaphor is translated into the juxtaposition of organic fluidity of the flowers vs. geometric structuring of the picture plane; and several fragments of the painting nearly “copy themselves” in its other areas.

Sonnet 10: Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Lena Levin

Sonnet 10: Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love? 20″x20″. Oil on linen. 2012

For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any,
Who for thyself art so unprovident.
Grant, if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many,
But that thou none lovest is most evident;
For thou art so possess’d with murderous hate
That ‘gainst thyself thou stick’st not to conspire.
Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate
Which to repair should be thy chief desire.
O, change thy thought, that I may change my mind!
Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?
Be, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Or to thyself at least kind-hearted prove:
Make thee another self, for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

The challenge of this sonnet lies in its focus the contrast between the visible and the real, the outside and the inside. It’s the first appearance of this motive, but it will reappear later on in the sequence, sometimes accompanied with stabs at the painters, who can only represent the visible, but not the real. Here, the gracious, love-inspiring appearance is opposed to the hate, even to oneself, that is lodged in it.

How can a painter, despite Shakespeare’s conviction of this being impossible, convey the real hidden behind the visible? In this translation, I am trying to apply the discoveries of Pavel Filonov’s “analytical realism”. This sonnet painting doesn’t refer to any specific work by Filonov, but is most straightforwardly related to his “Heads” series; I include one of his paintings from this series (“Head”. Oil on paper. 74 x 64 cm. c. 1935.) to illustrate his approach to dissecting and analyzing the visible.

Within my own series, on the other hand, this painting picks up and continues the motive of young man’s face borrowed from Titian’s “Man with a glove”. In contrast to the the third sonnet painting, where this face first appears, now it is distorted and broken by self-destructive hate.

Colourwise, the original idea of this translation was to try and convey the contrast between hate and love, central to the sonnet, as a contrast between different reds: a gentle, warmer red of love vs. a blood-like, intense red of hate. The most essential insight along the road was that these reds, the counterparts of love and hate in my visual space, aren’t that different after all. What sets them apart is the colours they are immediately juxtaposed to: a gracious interplay of purples and warm yellow-oranges of the background vs. stark, dark, cold greens and blues within the outline of distorted face.

Shakespeare in colour

Painting Shakespeare's sonnets, by Lena Levin

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