Nicole Page-Smith
Time is of the essence
Reminded of the light of London and Richmond Park where the deer flock. We visited parks during the day as by four in the afternoon during winter you experience the opposite of the Southern Hemisphere and it is dark. The light also feels as though it is in reverse and the mourning light feels like late afternoon. Staying near a woodland, parkland was all around London, famous for its parks and gardens as Venice would be famous for its light. We are left with the intellect and the spirit of Tiepolo. Rococo was a style fashionable in France for natural form and nature while other artists of the time where more decorative as with Francois Boucher, Jean-Honore Fragonard and Antoine Watteau, they are also very serious paintings. Seduced not by the fashion or education, you feel Tiepolo may have walked in the morning or at lunch. However, maybe the sunset was all Tiepolo was thinking perhaps the memory but the spirit's light. The lightness of palette of Tiepolo does suggest a time of day. Time is god in the general understanding of the god Chronos but in the darkened corner of the painting, "An Allegory with Venus and Time" (1754-1758), appears to take us to the shadows. The allegory of the Greek god Time would have more poetic resonance for the Italian painter, Tiepolo. Time is of the essence.
By Nicole Page-Smith
