Mark Sheeky Artworks

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.

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.

The poem which inspired this work was about the memory of smoking, the word silver relating to the lighter. The black holes on the left mimic the pattern of holes on a petrol lighter. As a poem about ageing, this more than ever is about time passing, memory and transience. The arm of the painted Chatterton is here, dripping fragments of paper, or flesh, or flakes of ash.

The greyness indicates a past, a contrast with the more colourful and craggy present of the aged face on the right.