Primavera dawns, and maybe hope. The spring equinox is a week in the rear-view mirror, and in front are light-tipped mornings. I can feel the change in my garden already, not least as new leaves pop up to remind me that I planted bulbs in truly random places. This is the time to get outdoors, but I am also preoccupied with cultural depictions of the season in galleries and libraries.
Spring in art makes me think of the painter Joan Eardley, who chronicled the year’s changes through her palette. Before the flat ochre fields of summer come minty borders and tangles of pink and honey blooms. I take Eardley’s white blobs in Hedgerows with Grasses and Flowers (1962-63) to be cow parsley, a signifier of
