Mural with Matching Sky

On the corner by the pub car park is a new mural
after van Dyck’s Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed.
Let me count the ways this work inspired by a portrait
of a dead woman paradoxically fills me with happiness.

Huge and bright and apart from the rose mostly blue,
it’s by the German artist Claudia Walde, aka MadC,
a woman of bold vision and talent and about the age
Venetia Digby was when she died in her sleep in 1633.

What Claudia did here is such a surprise: a nifty project,
these “old master murals” by street artists talking back
to their chosen works in the gallery have flashed up
on blank walls and gable ends all over Dulwich, but

none has taken my breath, none makes me stop and
smile and ponder each time I see it the way this does –
a mistressful meeting of past and present, of private
and public art, death and unrestrained but not unthinking life.

The wide, rather bleak road junction at The Plough in East Dulwich is two minutes’ walk from my house. I’ve been finding it less bleak since the mural by MadC appeared last September on the big, windowless side wall of the house next to the pub car-park. This, responding to van Dyck’s Venetia, Lady Digby, on Her Deathbed, is my favourite of all the Dulwich murals created in response to works in the Picture Gallery – and I pass it nearly every time I leave home! It introduced me to the work of MadC and sent me off to see her London gallery show at Pure Evil Gallery in Shoreditch. And then it inspired a poem, which was published, along with my photo, in the lovely international online poetry and art journal Gnarled Oak. Having this beautiful street art at the end of my street makes me happy.