Lamb White Days

1992-93

oil on linen

94 ½  x 78 inches

In 1992  I was selected by the Edna St Vincent Millay artist colony in up-state New York which inspired this direct observation of a snow landscape. Edna was a poet and the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The writer and artist retreat bearing her name provided an opportunity to create. Aspects of this painting echo sentiments in her first verse from Wine from These Grapes:

Wine from these grapes I shall be treading surely

Morning and noon and night until I die.

Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.

The title of my work is derived from a line in Dylan Thomas’s poem Fern Hill.  The empty booze bottles on the ground and the floating labels refer to his perception of a drunken twilight state in a snowy landscape. He said of the drunken state that it cushions the senses in a dull way like a blanket of snow. It is a place made up of time lost where passing moments are not noticed.

To mourn the loss of time, in the drunken state, a natural forest landscape contrasts with the application of individual family names. Written over the trees and sky it hints at how the past visits the present.

Throughout the landscape are escaped booze labels in a setting of both day and night. Peeing male and female cherubs amuse themselves under a vaulted ceiling complete with vines and Watney’s Red Barrel - typically English humour in the face of reality.

In a drunken state all is surreal. The alcoholic beverages, their labels departed, take to the landscape in a menacing way. Night sky turns into day so that the illusion of static time is dispelled making the drunken situation endless.

Upstate New York, the vantage point used to create this work, was also the location of the house where poet Edna St Vincent Millay was found one morning dead from alcoholism. 

On the upside, the (family) tree has chiselled into the bark the logo of the non-alcoholic beverage that Guinness provide: “Kaliber”.

Chore

Haagen Dazs

Reproduction

Lamb White Days

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Campaign Salt Ad

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