A couple of weeks back I slapped up a few pictures of a poem into a blog post without much of an explanation… this was gratuitous calligraphy exposure… akin to unnecessary nudity in films. I apologise. I am referring to my rendering of Sweet Neglect by Ben Jonson. It is time to right that wrong… put some clothes on it so to speak.
Whenever I write a poem out in calligraphy I probably write it out in rough about four or five times to get a sense of what the poem is about. Sometimes I write it out more than this depending on how stupid I am feeling.
I realised what Sweet Neglect was about half way through my third rough draft… Ben is a bloke waiting to go out somewhere special with his partner. She is late home from work and hasn’t got time to get ready properly. She is flustered… Ben looks at her, and instead of simply saying you look fine as you are, he instead puts pen to paper and writes her the poem Sweet Neglect… which more or less says the same thing, but with more words…
Anyhow… with this in my mind I decided on a fun approach when I came to writing it out… I used a modern calligraphy style, which I actually drew rather than wrote, which took far longer than just writing it… but it gave me more options when it came to colour/shading etc. I used gouache and gold powder.
Here are some pics of the poem in progress….

Still to be coloured in….

Should I have left it like this?!

Adding colour…

Colouring the lettering….

The finished version of this is in my gallery… HERE

This was an interesting experiment, I am sort of pleased with it. There is more about Ben Jonson HERE…. blimey… he used to write satirical comedies… I have only just looked this up. I am amused! Hopefully he would be happy with my interpretation!

Meanwhile… I have a few more experiments on the go… so better get on….

Toodlepip,

Sx