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 for this painting by Maggie Waker was about the passing of a bedtime story from grandparent to grandchild, and the dream-like quality lent itself to skies and wide expanses to fly within. The windows from the Chatterton painting, like in the original painting, are a symbol of escape, but perhaps here an escape into dreams and the fantasy story, rather than the immortality of the poet.

This series of three paintings was composed, drawn, painted, and framed in just 8 days which meant that all of these works were painted in one layer of paint. This work in particular was a huge challenge to complete in the eight hours or so that were allocated to make this extremely tight deadline.