JONATHAN SCHOFIELD: The Defiance of Summer

In his essay The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire writes that modernity consists of the transient and the contingent - one half of art, while the other lies in the eternal and the immutable. He speaks of drawing from fashion its poetic essence within the context of history, of extracting the eternal from the ephemeral. To describe his vision of modernity and beauty, he coins the phrase “immutable ephemeral”. He sought to capture the fleeting beauty of his time while revealing something unchanging within it. Poetry, he believed, should express that duality. This philosophical observation resonates with Jonathan Schofield’s vision of painting. As he says: “It’s the momentary made solid, the passing gesture held in coloured pigment - painting as luminous - painting as a way to hold time.”

The Defiance of Summer - and the girl in the painting bearing that title - can be seen as a rite of passage, a symbol of coming of age. In contrast to Picasso’s Fillette à la Corbeille Fleurie (1905), depicting a teenage girl naked and holding a basket of red flowers, her expression marked by a resigned fatalism, Schofield’s modern girl is dressed in a pink swimsuit and meets our gaze through the masked protection of sunglasses, garden hose raised like a weapon. The male gaze - something Schofield is acutely aware of - has shifted. This new girl stands her ground, clothed, armed, unapologetic. She does not beckon. At almost two metres tall, the scale of the painting amplifies its assertion.

Schofield takes issue with John Berger’s formulation of the male gaze as something always “internalised” by a passive female subject. He believes this outdated yet widely accepted theory is too binary, leaving little room for active subversion, irony, or self-aware performance. Instead, he aligns himself with contemporary feminist theorists who argue for a more layered understanding of female and male subjectivity, or with Jacques Rancière, whose writings on the politics of aesthetics resonate more deeply with the complex negotiations of seeing and being seen in a post-digital culture.

The Father - the handsome man reclining on a couch - might first be read as a dandy or playboy, defined by charm and self-indulgence. Yet he is also a father, perhaps even the father of the defiant girl in the pink swimsuit. There is a subtle interconnectedness between these two figures: separate in time and space, yet bound by an evolving sense of identity and shifting generational perspectives.

Not the End unfolds on a stiflingly hot afternoon in a garden with trees - possibly Kensington Gardens - where three fashion models, elegantly dressed in white, inhabit a scene thick with cinematic drama and dreamlike tension. In the foreground, one woman shades her eyes from the sun with a raised arm; beneath her full skirt, she wears black high-heeled leather boots, while a discarded newspaper crossword lies at her feet. Another, seen from behind in a strapless evening gown, walks her dog on a red lead. In the distance, a third woman reclines on the grass in a mini-skirt, quenching her thirst from a bottle. The deep purple-blue sky casts an uncanny light across the scene. Though rooted in contemporary fashion and detail, the painting unexpectedly evokes the atmosphere of Paul Delvaux: surreal, detached, faintly melancholy. It captures the duality Baudelaire described, drawing beauty from modern life while echoing the classical and timeless through its strange stillness.

In FOMO in Paris, a girl leans from her balcony against a bright blue night sky, peering into the street below. Is she calling to someone, or is it just the fear of missing out? In The Blue Room, narrative mystery unfolds. A woman with an umbrella, rendered in soft shadow except for the vivid red suitcase she carries, seems to be leaving the man in a black raincoat who lingers in the doorway behind her. The red of his beret links him visually to her suitcase, a thread connecting departure and belonging. A book is pinned to a tree; a painting hangs within the blue room beyond. Nothing is fully explained, yet everything suggests possibility.

Taken together, Schofield’s paintings inhabit the fertile tension between the fleeting and the eternal. They catch life mid-gesture: a raised hose, a shaded gaze, a suitcase carried into the unknown. These are not passive images; they breathe, resisting fixed meaning. Like Baudelaire’s “immutable ephemeral”, they reveal beauty as something alive and unstable - something that slips through our grasp even as it is held in paint.

Schofield’s vision is rooted firmly in the present. His observation of fashion is acute, woven into the fabric of his paintings not as ornament but as a way of capturing the pulse of contemporary life. Just as Baudelaire drew poetry from the fashions of his day, and as the Impressionists and German Expressionists caught the fleeting codes of their own times, Schofield infuses his figures with the sensibilities of ours. Swimsuits, sunglasses, boots, and suitcases are signifiers of the moment, yet within them lies something enduring: poise, longing, defiance, desire.

There is a great sense of style in these works - a painterly elegance influenced by Matisse, visible in the luminous planes of colour. Yet style here is never superficial: it becomes a means of transformation, a way of making the everyday radiant.

The Defiance of Summer becomes more than a title - it is an attitude that threads through the paintings, a refusal to settle for static identities or simple readings. Schofield’s subjects meet us with irony and confidence, vulnerability and grace. Time folds in on itself: the old meets the new, memory meets desire, and we find ourselves caught in that suspended instant where meaning has not yet settled. These are paintings of our present time - luminous with contradiction, charged with beauty, touching time even as it slips away. They do not close the story; they open it, inviting us to look again, deeper - and in that act of looking, we glimpse the eternal shimmering within the fleeting.