Barbary Allen

Sweet William died for me today

I'll die for him tomorrow

Barbary Allen speaks of the cruelty of lost and unattained love. I wanted to try to resolve this is my painting - perhaps because of the idealist in me. Barbary Allen and Sweet William are joined together in my painting, entwined within each other as in the rose and the briar, in an imagined landscape. I was thinking of a deathly yet beautiful place. The white sands and gentle colours suggest a peaceful afterlife. The couple are suspended gently above the contingencies of space and time. They are placed in a space which is intangible and out of reach but joined together eternally. 

I wanted to take the song back home to England, so I found inspiration from some polaroids I took in St. Ives. I love the feeling of small British coastal towns, the sense of loneliness and separation, slight mystic qualities of the sea and the rain, the flow of the waves and the (sometimes) peaceful blue of the sky and the water.

Banks of the Ohio

I took her by her lily white hand

And dragged her down that bank of sand

There I throwed her in to drown
I watched her as she floated down

My paintings this week tried to address an opposition I found in the Appalachian songs. I began listening to the music and was immediately drawn into the warmth and the collective joyful spirit of Will the Circle Be Unbroken and Banks of the Ohio. However, the lyrics to these songs addressed dark subjects of death, funerals and murder. I chose to paint my impressions of Banks of the Ohio. I had strong associations with colour. The yellow evokes warmth, the happiness experienced by walking along with someone you love, whereas the deep maroon colour of the second panel links with a feeling of being overwhelmed and betrayed. The river, seen flowing in the first panel, consumes the viewer in the second.