Charlie Sheard
Aitia

The Aitia (from the Greek Αιτια, meaning causes or origins) was a long poem written by the Hellenistic poet Kallimakos (Καλλιμαχος) in the third century BCE. The Aitia opened with the poet’s description of a dream in which he was transported to Mount Helicon and tutored in secret knowledge by the Muses. The poem was developed from there into a catalogue of the origins of ancient myths, customs and religious mysteries. Kallimakos was interested in complex techniques, rare narratives, unusual words, and in surprising combinations of effect; his poem engaged with other important Greek literary texts by means of quotation, allusion and commentary. In supplying complex elaboration of the origins of both religious practice and of art, Kallimakos reminded his reader that the work of art is divine in origin, a reminder as timely today as it was in the third century BCE.

Whilst I have been preparing this body of work, my mother has been terminally ill; I have been constantly reminded in other ways too of the frailty of our condition, of the vanity and transience of human affections, and that life is really just a very short dream. Kallimakos dreamed of the Muses; almost everything he dreamt is lost. A few surviving fragments are all that is left of his Aitia, even though it was one of the most widely read and influential of all poems in the classical world. My new paintings are my Aitia, songs of origins and of endings.
Charlie Sheard, June 2013

[* The poet’s name is usually Latinised as Callimachus, his poem as the Aetia].