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.”
