From the soporific cadence of its opening line, ‘The Card-Dealer’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), unfolds its narrative in languid seduction. With masterly skill, the poem transports the reader to a heady non-corporeal plane; the space between the gossamer veil of life and death.

The poem was inspired by a painting by the symbolist artist Theodore Von Holst¹ entitled The Wish (also known as The Fortune Teller (1840). Dominating the centre of the canvas the figure of a woman stares out; her face is heavily shadowed contrasting with the bright illumination of her hands and the cards she deals. Her dark penetrating eyes hold the viewer whilst her hands and cards seal their fate. Rossetti’s poem serves as a commentary on the painting and successfully articulates the paintings rhythms with the use of a slow metronomic meter that hypnotizes the reader.

‘Could you not drink her gaze like wine
Yet, through its splendour swoon
Into the silence languidly
As a tune into a tune
Those eyes unravel the coil’d night
And know the stars at noon.’

If we view the opening line as an intoxicant contrived by Rossetti to lull the reader into a heady drunkenness, then we have to consider the lines that follow as a means to reduce the reader to a malleable stupor. Within this dream-space the lines ‘into the silence languidly, as a tune into a tune’ evokes the notion that the reader is falling into the card-dealer’s rhythm, she is pre-ordained to ensnare those she encounters just as the reader is pre-destined to be caught. Powerless the reader is fast within the card-dealer’s grip, too mesmerised to attempt extrication.

As the poem progresses the card-dealer develops the mythical aura of the femme fatale, with a decadent beauty described in terms of precious metals– her hair is described as woven gold and she is decadently bejeweled:

‘Blood-red and purple, green and blue,
The great eyes of her rings’

The Card-Dealer has a magical ‘stillness’ that electrifies the air around her, she is otherworldly and in essence she is at the centre of humanity around who all other life must orbit.

Each verse is a card in her hand to be played and is an extension of her will. The final three verses make clear what her role is to the reader and allude to the true role of the cards: ‘The heart that doth crave…the diamond skill’d to make the base seem brave’ and chillingly ‘the spade, to dig a grave’. The final verse brings the denouement:

‘Her game in thy tongue is call’d life
As ebbs thy daily breath
When she shall speak, thou’lt learn her tongue
And know she calls it death’.

Rossetti greatly admired the painting by Von Holst and to some extent it illustrates Rossetti’s predilection towards the narrative and figurative power of the femme fatale, indeed this motif surfaces with rhythmic regularity throughout Rossetti’s career from Beatrice to Lilith the seductress.

1. The Rossetti archive

The card dealer http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-card-dealer/

‘New Fiction’ is the current exhibition of Martin Greenland’s work at the Cornerstone Gallery at Liverpool Hope University. Consisting of approximately 20 works the exhibition marks a triumphant return to Liverpool for Greenland following his success in 2006 when he won the John Moores painting prize for his work Before Vermeer’s Clouds.

A statement for ‘New Fiction’ asserts that the works in the exhibition represent ‘ the balance between the believable, based upon what is seen, and the unbelievable, the unseen’; and without a doubt there is something of the uncanny within Greenland’s paintings.  juxtaposing the familiar with the strange Greenland creates a truly ‘das unheimlech’ sensation; the viewer is disquieted, yet seduced. A wonderful articulation of this sensation can be found in works such as End of Empire and Northumberland, Before and After (No3). Both canvasses are texturally rich and suffused with velveteen darkness, that in the Edmund Burke use of the word are sublime. They have an eerie gothic quality in the best tradition of Ann Radcliffe’s 1791 novel The Romance of the Forest.

End of Empire, with its decaying building surrounded by dark and claustrophobic trees with a beach just visible is a haunting image. The dilapidated building could be anything from a public Art Gallery to an asylum, its classical architecture at odds with the wild woods that surround and threaten to engulf it. Each of the components, the building, the woods and the beach are familiar in isolation yet combined as they are in this work they are as elusive and dreamlike – it is a place on unreality, a place to escape to and from.

Similarly, Northumberland, Before and After (No3) utilizes a brooding palette of colours again to the effect of creating an ambiguous space that is both beauty and terror combined. However The Flood and Playground could be considered the polar opposites to the works already discussed. Both these works are bright daylight scapes with open breathable compositions but are no less sinister for it. If anything I found these paintings infinitely more disquieting than the dark canvasses. They have a different sense of dereliction, where End of Empire has the sense of gentility in decay, Playground feels like an abrupt abandonment, largely due to the palpability of humanity, there is a trace of what was and what could be again.

Although the landscape is dominant within Martin Greenland’s paintings, for me they are not Landscape paintings, they are more charged and more personal than that. There is nothing twee about the subject matter or the emotions they evoke and are definitely worth spending a couple of hours with so as to fully absorb and appreciate the nuanced atmosphere of each work.

Martin Greenland – New Fiction is at the Cornerstone Gallery, Liverpool Hope University from 18th September to 12th November 2010

Cornerstone Gallery  http://www.hope.ac.uk/cornerstone-gallery/welcome-to-the-cornerstone-gallery.html

Martin Greenland  http://www.martingreenland.co.uk/