Thursday 3 February 2011

Ophelia


My latest online discovery is a fabulous, fantastical website with the power of the TARDIS. It can transport through time and space at the click of a button, whilst toying with emotions with a sublime subtlety. The TARDIS I describe is the Google Art Project and the Doctor this morning was no longer David Tennant or even Matt Smith, it was Sophie Adler.

Traversing through the Pre-Raphaelite works, I stumbled upon Millais’s Ophelia, an enthralling depiction still mesmerising from a 13” laptop. Poignant, pretty and poetic flowers surround Ophelia. Her emotions are exposed, each lying in a different state of life or dormancy. Nettles growing around willow branches to symbolise pain, the presence of forget-me-nots, sorrow expressed in a floating pheasant’s eye, each perfectly painted for a purpose. The nettles still had an ability to sting me despite their brushstroke existence. With no dock leaf to hand, I was forced to endure the plague of agitation caused by an injection of histamine by team of trichromes. Perhaps my emotions are just as discernable as Ophelia’s and the problem is my inability to identify the flowers. No knowledge of the name or genus and the flower or the feeling is impossible to classify, nurture or prune. If I were a horticulturalist would I still find other’s flowers more manageable and beautiful than my own untamed, undistinguishable collection? 

1 comment:

  1. are your flowers wilting? Is there something we can do?

    Els from Amsterdam

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