Russh Magazine

His are the old books decorating our bedroom floor - inside our wonky underlines scrawled on yellowing paper so to never forget a word. Each sentence alone, an individual Oscar Wilde masterpiece.

Although her technique may slightly outweigh our scribbles, artist Del Kathryn Barton has drawn a few lines of her own in the name of this literary man. Conjuring up much kindness to the eyes in her new book The Nightingale and the Rose.

A regular conspirator of the Romance Was Born tribe and 2008 Archibald Prize winner - it's in Barton's work that the same brevity looms overs the words she interprets. In each stroke, every monochromatic detail, all the colourful seeping.

Of the work the artist indulged "This is a story where love is radical transformation … The nightingale is the true artist, she gives completely of her deepest essence."

And Barton seems to have given completely of hers - offering one of those somethings you can keep forever (together with the tattered paperbacks and pen marks).

After all, what is it that the Wilde one prescribed: "Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow one another like the withered leaves of autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity."

The Nightingale and the Rose (Dott Publishing) by Del Kathryn Barton in collaboration with Art & Australia magazine.

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