The Fall

Above: " Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" (1558) by Pieter Breugel the Elder.

Above: A sad attempt at paying homage to a truly great painting :)

Also my first oil pastel painting. I became obsessed with Breugel's canvas following gnothi seauton's lead, and Auden's poem inspired by the scene forms the perfect verbal accompaniment to the visual.

Did I mention I LOVE oil pastels? :) Such a beautiful, tactile medium. Feels like smearing paint directly onto the surface. More to come soon...hopefully :)

Musee des Beaux Arts

- W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.