Mark Sheeky - surrealist art gallery, poetry, music, and personal site

Painted for a competition with the theme of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Any of the more than 70 four line poems (rubaiyat) could have been selected so I used the random function on my calculator and number thirty five was chosen.

I think the vessel, that with fugitive
articulation answer'd, once did live,
and merry-make; and the cold lip I kiss'd.
How many kisses might it take - and give.

I interpreted the poem as love for a sculpture, and moreso the love of art, at once dead and living too, equated with religious love. Therefore the painting became about the love of art and the immortal love of that which is dead.

A painter stares with love at a woman emerging from a painting, yet she too is stone, and dead like all art. Organic embracing forms on the left indicate the rawest and most base of earthly passions, a memory perhaps? The painter transforms into a rose, touching the centre of a circle of gold leaf reminiscent of religions iconography. The bone crucifix indicates dead yet living religion.

Magic is contained here too as the painting is filled with the perfection of mathematics. The picture's width and height corresponds to the golden ratio and a hidden pentacle forms the central fulcrum of the composition in the vanishing points on the right. Perfect love then is immortal and necessarily for that which is dead; the love of mathematics then, or the love of God as mathematics.