Jag – Sonnet 54
A portrait of Brisbane dancer Jag Popham, painted at 22, at the height of his physical career, before his move to London. The work brings together two of my ongoing series: the Sleep paintings, which emerged from my parallel practice as a deep tissue massage therapist for physical performers, and the Shakespeare's Sonnets series.
Each Sleep session begins with a 90-minute massage, allowing the subject to rest deeply before the painting begins, a process that deepens the intimacy of the work and makes visible something of the inner person.
Sonnet 54 meditates on beauty and truth, and the capacity of art to preserve what time erodes. In Jag, I found a subject whose intrinsic self, his integrity and physical grace, was the very embodiment of that idea.
O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their masked buds discloses:
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth.