The Year's at the Spring 1920

Harry Clarke made this drawing, ‘The Year’s at the Spring’ with pen, ink and watercolour. You can almost imagine the artist carefully building up the image through layer upon layer of tiny marks. I love how the figures float unbound by gravity. There’s this beautiful sense of rhythm created by the garland of red beads, which makes me think of Matisse’s dancers, all holding hands. But here, instead of a human chain, it’s a chain of beads which seems to unite them in a game. The artist’s use of watercolour gives the image this dreamlike quality, like a hazy memory or a half-forgotten fairy tale. Artists are always in dialogue, drawing on what’s come before and reinterpreting it in their own way, and this feels like one stop in an ongoing conversation. This kind of playful ambiguity is what makes art so endlessly fascinating to me, you know?