BY: PINDOW BARAOV
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, Percy Bysshe Shelley famously concluded his essay, “A Defence of Poetry”. While most people are chiefly interested in reading the works of a poet, I have always been fascinated with the personalities and likenesses of the poets themselves. My most recent artwork is of the poet Shelley, looking into a microscope. I found it intriguing how a person like Shelley, who was very much interested in natural sciences during his Eton days and authored the reasonable essay “The Necessity of Atheism”, decided to give himself entirely to imagination, to poetry. I believe the likenesses and lives of poets somewhat mirror their poetic ideals and aesthetics. There have been some great portraits of Shelley in the past, such as Joseph Severn’s posthumous portrait of Shelley composing Prometheus Unbound. However, this doesn’t change the issue that there are only a handful of portraits of Percy out there. I think that the great poets deserve more love! That was the goal of my latest digital painting: to add a little droplet into the meagre puddle of existing portraits. An earlier digital painting of mine depicts the french poet Arthur Rimbaud on a boat – this is of course an obvious reference to his most famous poem, “The Drunken Boat”. I think that poem nicely describes Mr. Rimbaud’s hectic life.
My other two digital paintings are heavily inspired by the artwork of the great artist-poet William Blake. Never has there existed a man more fit to paint poetic images. An interesting fact about Blake some people may not know of is that he actually created a poem responding to Lord Byron’s “Cain”. Im sure there are people out there more fit to analyze this poem than me, a humble amateur artist.
