Literature

The gaze is steady, but it’s not trying to impress. This face doesn’t confront, it absorbs. The eyes feel alert, but inward-looking. It’s a portrait of someone who has witnessed, considered, distilled.

Compared to the saturated confidence of Man of Mystery, The Poet carries a different kind of intensity. Still youthful, still burning with colour but less in performance than in perception. The brushstrokes swirl with warmth: cadmium reds and saffron yellows layered into sea-blues and violets. There’s a rhythm to them, almost like phrasing as if the painting were spoken, not painted.

This isn’t about writing poems. It’s about seeing like a poet: noticing the flicker behind the face, the world inside the world. The direct gaze feels less about being watched than about being understood, and understanding in return. The background is alive, but ungraspable. Like a thought forming. Or a truth just beyond words.

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” — W.H. Auden.

But Paul Wright paints the language before it becomes words. The Poet is the moment thought becomes colour, and feeling becomes form.

Both portraits are, in a sense, studies in sovereignty. They offer nothing on demand. But they transform the space around them. And in doing so, they reward the viewer, not with clarity, but with depth.