The Poetry of Silence

In a world of 'now', in which talking, communicating, writing, emailing, texting,and phoning fill our lives, taking time to stop and be silent often has to be enforced. Vilhelm Hammershoi is a silence enforcer, a painter whose canvases are acute observations of not the everyday, but the backdrop to the everyday. He paints the settings and scenes of daily life - a spartan house with pictures hung in unusual arrangements here, an empty interior disturbed only by a shaft of light there. Dust caught in sunlight, a solitary figure turning away from the painter. Hammershoi, not to get too philosophical, appears to be a man trying to bottle time, painstakingly capturing an instant before pouring it out onto a stretched white canvas. Hammershoi's paintbrush silences a London street as it takes shape on the canvas, there are no bustling figures here.Only a palette of muted colours, everything tinged with grey.A suspicion that Hammershoi might have been happy watching paint dry is never far away, that he might have uttered no more than five words in a day is a thought that speaks loudly. His view of the world, slow to reveal itself, unsettles.But it makes you stop, makes you stare. His paintings make audible the poetry of silence.