“When spring came, there were no problems except where to be happiest.” – Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast
Welcome to the Spring Collection!
Spring can mean many different things. A fresh, new beginning. The end of winter. A transition out of a kind of hibernation.
From flash showers, to sunny days with vast blue skies, to grey, windy days, and everything in between, Spring’s unpredictability is tempered by its slow and steady unfurling of life. Budding trees, cherry blossoms and incrementally longer, brighter days.
The choices in this collection embody the feeling of emerging out of darkness and the change that comes with it. Each of them evokes different feelings but present in all of them is hope. Hope that coming months will be brighter, more alive and full of excitement for the future.
However you experience this season, my hope is that these picks enhance your experience of this vibrant, unpredictable season.
Painting: The Convent Garden by William John Leech, c. 1913
Leech captures sunlight in the garden in a way that seems to radiate from the canvas. It evokes serenity and a bright hope, similar to the way the first few warm rays of sun do at the break of spring.
Painted in around 1913, the main figure is the only one whose full face appears, looking up from her prayer book and into the trees above, seemingly completely unaware of and undisturbed by the viewer. Posing as this figure, the painter’s first wife, Elizabeth, appears angelic in the sunlight, dressed entirely in white in the traditional clothing worn by nuns taking their final vows.
Leech spent a period of time in Concarneau, Brittany in France where this paitning is believed to have been made. The location the painter places the viewer in feels hidden, removed from the group of figures in the background, just out of sight covered by the dangling branches from the unseen trees above.
His brushwork varies in style and technique across the canvas, representing the various effects of sunlight. In parts, it is thick and swirling creating vivid contrasts between the light and shadows on the flowers and leaves. In others, it is smooth and naturalistic, like the crisp white drapes of the figures and rosy cheeks of the central figure.
The colour palette, natural imagery and glistening white costumes, alongside Leech’s ability to capture light in his painting, evoke a sense of bright new beginnings reminiscent of spring.
Song: Touching Toes by Olivia Dean
Similar to the budding romance in its lyrics, the song feels like the slow but unstoppable unraveling of spring.
The guitar is soft and melodious, reminiscent of Spanish guitar, and the harmonies lend themselves to the overall warmth of the song.
This is a single from just before Olivia Dean’s meteoric rise. As a single, it acts as a buffer and hints at the direction and style she was to go in the not-so-distant future.
Characteristic of her music, it is a love song that feels gentle, intimate and emotive. She describes feeling resistant to the beginning of a new romance – the clichés, the slow overlap of personal space, the gentle surrender to love. The story unfolds, not through explicit descriptions of dates and interactions, but through hints of his presence in her life and her own reckoning with her feelings, judgements, and lowering of boundaries.
Album: Wasteland, Baby! by Hozier
Following a one year hiatus from his work after his first world tour, Hozier began writing this album as a way of making sense of the world. Amidst the chaos and despair that drove him to create this album, the end result was a body of music that, while recognising the darkness, had hope woven into the fabric of each song. The album explores a range of themes, some apocalyptic, and humanity through relationships and love.
He deliberately leant into punchier, rhythmic music, like in Sunlight, Dinner & Diatribes and Be, that hit a little stronger than his first album. These tracks were balanced with the slow, acoustic style of songs he is known for like Shrike and the title track Wasteland, Baby!, and upbeat songs that feel energetic and lively like Would That I and To Noise Making (Sing).
As a general rule of thumb, the subject matter and lyrics mirror the musicality of the song, creating a kind of pathetic fallacy within the album.
He explained the significance of the exclamation mark in the title to be a ‘wry smile’ that hints to the album’s expressions of ‘devastation and joy’. (Time Magazine)
This mix of darker and lighter musical and thematic styles feels like an echo of Spring’s many contrasting sides, this album offers something for every aspect of what this season brings.
It balances the good with the bad, and in doing so offers a little hope and a lot of great music.
Book: The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim
What a way of entering spring! This novel is as light, vibrant and bursting with life as the season itself.
Drawing on her own time spent in an Italian castle, Von Arnim’s vivid descriptions of the villa, gardens and Mediterranean coast are grounded in real experience rather than imagination alone, and it shows.
The novel is written in a style that allows the narrator to create a window into the inner thoughts of the characters themselves. Known as free indirect speech, this style allowed for a balance between the intimacy of first person narrative and the descriptive omniscience of third person.
Set in the early 1920s, the four main characters, each entirely unlike the others, evolve in bold, heartwarming ways. There is the domineering, old-school Victorian Mrs. Fisher, the timid, unsure Lotty Wilkins, the beautiful but cold socialite Lady Caroline Dester, and the pious yet unfulfilled Rose Arbuthnot. They meet each other when Lotty and Rose place an ad in the newspaper looking for people to split the cost of an Italian villa. Weeks later, they are on their way by ship, train and horse-drawn fly towards the greatest transformation of their lives. Despite having joined the holiday for similar reasons, to escape London and its dreariness, the journeys that are inspired within each character by this unassuming holiday are vastly different from one another, and unfold in exactly the ways which each of them need. While they begin as strangers, the Italian spring time, with its almost magical effect, encourages transformation and connection among each of them.
While this novel is of its time, the premise is simple and enjoyable enough for it to be a great accessory to Springtime. There is wit, humour, misfortune, and unbridled joy woven throughout descriptions of blooming flowers and the sparkling Mediterranean.
Poem: Spring by Mary Oliver, House of Light, 1990
This choice might be the truest expression of Spring. The sentiment of this poem can be expressed in its central stanzas: ‘There is only one question: / how to love this world’. It describes a bear, emerging from hibernation after the long, dark winter months, and how she reacquaints herself with the natural world, one sense at a time. Oliver’s brief but visceral descriptions of these actions give us an idea of the significance of these simple sensations after the long winter months.
Through this bear, Oliver explores the simple pleasures of Spring. This ‘wordless’ creature doesn’t need high rise apartments or even art or language itself. She navigates her world in a sensory way, ‘breathing and tasting’. Oliver recognises we have this ability too, of exploring and connecting with nature through simple, sensory experiences. It is a way of connecting to nature in a more intimate and meaningful way.
Whether a metaphor for spring itself or a meditation on how the season brings a heightened awareness about the part we play in the natural world, this poem mirrors the bear’s re-emergence from hibernation.
Where To Be Happiest
A painting, a song, an album, a novel and a poem; each a different evocation of Spring. The stillness and the energy, the hopeful and the contemplative, the sparkling Italian coastline and a bear relearning, slowly, what it means to be alive. There is something here for whatever this season brings you. Hemingway had it right. The only real question is where to be happiest. Start here.
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