spent light

SPENT LIGHT SERIES

The series (still in progress) takes its title from the British poet John Milton’s (1608-74) sonnet ‘When I Consider How My Light Is Spent’, and its tendency from Pieter Breugel the Elder’s rendition of Icarus’s fall in the painting ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ (c.1560), at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

The poem is known to have been written in response to Milton’s loss of sight and the huge implications it had for his life, while, in Breugel’s painting Icarus is largely insignificant, a small detail in the bottom-right corner of the work, simply two legs disappearing into the water.

The series, therefore, uses the symbolism of (already experienced) dying light to reflect on the meaninglessness of personal endeavour and our infinite minuteness in the grand scheme of things.

The poet W. H. Auden alludes to this inconsequentiality of personal endeavour when he wrote of the painting in his poem Musee des Beaux Arts, from 1938:

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.