Part of The Ekphrastic Sonata, this painting explores the dialogue between word and image—ekphrasis as a process of transformation, where meaning shifts as it passes from poem to paint, from one imagination to another.

To A Fly Trapped In Amber takes its initial impulse from the poem To a Fly in Amber by John F. Keane. The poem’s meditation on time, preservation, and fragile immortality becomes, here, a visual meditation: a suspended moment stretched across deep time, where life and stillness coexist in quiet tension.

To unify the series, elements drawn from The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis are woven into the composition. These references do not appear as direct quotations, but as echoes—gestures, colours, or forms that subtly bind the works together, creating a shared visual language across the trilogy.

Executed within a single, concentrated week at the end of February 2019, the painting carries a sense of urgency beneath its stillness. Like the insect preserved in amber, the process itself becomes part of the meaning: a fleeting act of creation attempting to hold onto something timeless.

The result is an image poised between motion and permanence—a fragile life caught in a golden pause, inviting reflection on memory, mortality, and the unknowable depths that lie beneath even the smallest, most fleeting existence.