Unfolding the Chrysalis of Dusk

The nocturne is a form that comes spontaneously to a musician whose raw materials are sounds. Acoustic elements are probably more easily discerned in their purity when the hurly-burly of daytime has been muted, if not altogether silenced. Darkness and blackness are not usually appealing to visual artists unless they are after a contrasting flash of lightning or the neon blaze of underworld businesses. Even less is the nocturnal world attractive to water-colourists whose eyesight is the opposite of owlish and who delight most in subtle nuances and fluid chromatism. Hence, the latest explorations by Marc England as a visual artist are doubly surprising.

In the first place, water-colours are used neither as by Sunday afternoon amateurs just to give romantic impressions of landscapes, nor only in the manner of those more singular than rare predecessors who employed them more seriously to express some sort of world vision. England uses them to produce the most extreme form of monochrome possible, that is black, totally deprived of colour except for some varied and significant concessions to white and merely miserly admissions of just hints of other colours.

Probably only an artist with a background as a musical composer could have thought of the nocturnal images envisaged by Marc England. The difference between their execution in water-colours and what they would have been like in pen and ink drawing is analogous to that between Bach performed on harpsichord or on piano.

Images perceived in the depths of darkness are plainly wholly unlike usually ultra-vivid dream images of architectural landmarks. They are a metaphoric world shaped by a poetic eye in which a cathedral emerges proud and loud in an urban setting or a chapel sits humble and mumbling in a rural context. These constructs are metamorphosed into signs as pregnant with multiple meanings as the enveloping obscurity itself.

Each building, a sturdy and dynamic body immersed in liquid/turgid, malleable matter, determines from within the style and shape of its individual murky cocoon, and so ensures its recognisability, in spite of the unusual medium in which it appears.

The Protean Night that cloaks these original essays in nigrography is the same as that which delivers a major part of the raw material on which psychoanalysis works. Brightness at midnight provides Marc England with a lens with which to transmit an original vision. The most poignant encounters with the Holy occur in the dark nights of the soul. Austere jewels still glow in, to use Wittgenstein's phrase, the darkness of our times.

Prof. Peter Serracino Inglott (Former Rector University of Malta)