Mr Saunders' Dream of Spring

Jonathan Saunders SS11

I once traveled all the way to Paris and stood queuing in the rain to see a Mark Rothko retrospective. Rothko’s iconic paintings of luminous, soft-edged rectangles saturated with colour glowed from the walls in deep dark reds, oranges, yellows, maroons, browns, blacks, and greys.

I once studied briefly under Jonathan Saunders at London Printworks Trust in Brixton where I screen printed finely flowered camouflaged jump jets onto cream canvas. Saunder's gorgeously feminine dresses make me think of drifts of snowdrops and narcissus in spring meadows.

 
...A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line...

from William Wordsworth, Daffodils

Mark Rothko, Yellow and Gold

In Primavera, or Allegory of Spring, an elaborate pastoral scene by Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli, fabulously dressed figures feature with a blindfolded putto in an orange grove.  In a floral-patterned dress and crowned in blossom Flora scatters petals collected in the folds of her gown. Her companion, the nymph Chloris, draped in diaphanous white, is being seized by winged Zephyrus, the biting wind of March. Clustered on the left are the three graces wrapped in palest chiffon,  Hermes draped in rust-red wearing gladiator boots and Venus in a bustier brocaded, barely blue empire line dress.

 








Accessorise Saunders' tangerine printed dress with
Ocabini's mandarin chiffon cashmere scarf

Primavera Plane