And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
—Hamlet, Act I, Scene V
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I call this new painting Heaven and Earth. It’s about 7″ wide by 35″ tall on paper and is very much in the same vein as the very large painting that I recently completed and featured here, The Internal Landscape. This piece features a nocturnal scene however with a deep blue sky punctured by the light of stars.
The title might refer, in a way, to the lines above from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where Horatio and Marcellus barge in on Hamlet’s conversation with the ghost of his father. Horatio is a rationalist, philosophically, and to him the idea of ghosts seems absurd so that when Hamlet asks him to swear to not speak of what he has seenl he is mystified. Hamlet then utters the lines — There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I suppose this painting is saying much the same thing, that we live both in the world that we know and in a world of which we are unaware. The stars above are, and have been, always with us but we know little of them, really. The river runs but we often know little of its journey and the roads travel to places we shall never see. And around us at all times are radiowaves carrying voices and images from every corner of the globe, unseen and unheard. And perhaps among all this are the ghosts like Hamlet’s father, moving unnoticed by our eyes focused on that which we know and see. Or, at least, are trying to know.
I guess the takeaway here is that there is often more than meets the eye, even when the scene before you might seem enough.
Redtree Times 