Ekphrastic Sonata: To A Fly Trapped In Amber by Mark Sheeky

G1086A Ekphrastic Sonata: To A Fly Trapped In Amber
Oil on canvas panel
February 2019, Size 385x285 mm

Detail from Ekphrastic Sonata: To A Fly Trapped In Amber by Mark Sheeky Detail from Ekphrastic Sonata: To A Fly Trapped In Amber by Mark Sheeky Detail from Ekphrastic Sonata: To A Fly Trapped In Amber by Mark Sheeky Detail from Ekphrastic Sonata: To A Fly Trapped In Amber by Mark Sheeky

About this painting
One of three paintings developed for an exhibition at Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery exploring ekphrasis; paintings inspired by poems and poems inspired by paintings. The exhibition explored the transformation and evolution of artistic ideas across different media and different artists and poets.

One of three paintings developed for an exhibition at Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery exploring ekphrasis; paintings inspired by poems and poems inspired by paintings. The exhibition explored the transformation and evolution of artistic ideas across different media and different artists and poets.', 'I decided to use this opportunity to explore my ideas about structural forms which pervade in and across paintings, like the structures used in classical music. Music holds complexity together by using unifying themes, and for many years I had been using repeating shapes like a musical theme, transforming and varying this across and painting, and here, across a series. In these three paintings I chose a unifying visual theme, the famous Death of Chatterton painting, partly because of the obvious relationship between visual art and poetry, but also because the poems I chose to paint had a strong sense of passing time, like the famed Chatterton painting.

Here the face of the dead poet is obvious in the lower corner, and the eye moves up to the fly trapped in amber; the subject of the poem I was representing in paint. The shape made by the poets left eye and eyebrow is repeated in the sky in an abstracted form, and his right eye areas appears again in the landscape, as does his mouth an lips in the head of the fly.

Similar shapes from the poet's face appear fleetingly in many places here; large, small, and varied in different ways to play on the viewer's eye as the ear is played upon in a piece of classical music.

Ekphrastic Sonata: To A Fly Trapped In Amber (Original)
Price: £600.00
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