The Unforeseen
"The Unforeseen” Painted with acrylics on Arches Aquarelle paper, 640 gsm.
Black. White. And everything I felt in between. 🖤🤍
The Unforeseen was born from reading a Baudelaire poem so many times it stopped being words and became something else entirely, a feeling I had no choice but to paint.
Working only in black and white with liquid wax on paper, I pushed the medium to find every grey in tonal values available, letting the brush move between thin washes and thick, heavy paint, digging into the surface, watching the invisible become visible.
Each mark was both deliberate and discovered, a dialogue between intention and accident that defines my broader practice.
This is what I love most about making art at the intersection of poetry, music, and painting, the moment language runs out and the brushstrokes takes over.
Every painting I make is an unmapped journey. This one was no different.
🔹 Whenever I went to my art supplier to buy paper, I'd always ask... can this paper take some punishment?
🔸 Title: "The Unforeseen"
Medium: Synthetic polymer and liquid wax on paper.
Size: 106cm x 73cm.
Painted on Arches Aquarelle paper, 640 gsm.
SOLD
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Below the actual poem translated in English by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The Unforeseen
Harpagon, sitting up beside his father's bed,
Mused, as the breathing altered and the lips went gray,
"I've plenty of old planks, I think, out in the shed;
I saw them there the other day."
Célimène coos and says, "How beautiful I am!
God, since my heart is kind, has made me fair, as well!"
Her heart! — as tough as leather, her heart! — smoked like a ham;
And turning on a spit in hell!
A sputtering gazetteer, who thinks he casts a light,
Says to his readers drowned in paradox and doubt,
"Where do you see him, then, this God of Truth and Right?
This Savior that you talk about?"
Better than these I know — although I know all three —
That foppish libertine, who yawns in easy grief
Nightly upon my shoulder, "All right, you wait and see;
I'm turning over a new leaf!"
The clock says, "The condemned is ready; you may call
For him; I have advised in vain as to those flaws
Which threatened; Man is blind, deaf, fragile — like a wall
In which an insect lives and gnaws."
Whereat a Presence, stranger to few, greeted by none,
Appears. "Well met!" he mocks; "have I not seen you pass
Before my sacred vessel, in communion
Of joyousness, at the Black Mass?
"Each of you builds in secret a temple to my fame;
Each one of you in secret has kissed my foul behind;
Look at me; hear this laughter: Satan is my name, —
Lewd, monstrous as the world! Oh, blind,
"Oh, hypocritical men! — and did you think indeed
To mock your master? — trick him till double wage be given?
Did it seem likely two such prizes be decreed:
To be so rich — and enter Heaven?
"The game must pay the hunter; the hunter for his prey
Lies chilled and cramped so long behind the vain decoy;
Down through the thickness now I carry you away,
Companions of my dreary joy;
"Down through the thickness of primeval earth and rock,
Thickness of human ashes helter-skelter blown,
Into a palace huge as I — a single block —
And of no soft and crumbling stone!
"For it is fashioned whole from Universal Sin;
And it contains my grief, my glory and my pride!"
— Meantime, from his high perch above our earthly din,
An Angel sounds the victory wide
Of those whose heart says, "Blessèd be this punishment,
O Lord! O Heavenly Father, be this anguish blest!
My soul in Thy kind hands at last is well content,
A toy no more; Thou knowest best!"
So sweetly, so deliciously that music flows
Through the cool harvest evenings of these celestial days,
That like an ecstasy it penetrates all those
Of whose pure lives it sings the praise.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Flowers of Evil (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1936)
Should you wish to read more translations in English by other translators as well as in French, visit here at FleursDuMal.org
