Stairway to heaven
There’s a lady who’s sure
All that glitters is gold
And she’s buying a stairway to heaven.
Or so the Led Zeppelin song goes and kept on going in my head when I saw this staircase in the Victoria and Albert Museum one year.
I said to my friend…
“This is going to be a painting one day”,
I was drawn to the contrast of the contemporary glazing with the ancient wooden carving the setting of two opposites together but more than that, the staircase as a metaphor is something that intrigues me. And this one more than most.
I took this rather dark picture on my phone with no flash.
This staircase once went somewhere.
It was part of a building which is gone now. Yet here it is preserved, incomplete, going nowhere. There are many analogies I could draw:
- The futility of carving an elaborate path but not paying attention to where it goes.
- Of living in the shoes of another, following a beautiful pathway created by someone else that ultimately gets you where you don’t want to be.
- The finality of life, this once went somewhere but now it doesn’t. It ended!
- Of looking at purpose out of context. This once went somewhere and made sense but now it’s been taken away from its environment and is like a fish out of water.
And now it is this painting.
