FREE SHIPPING Shipping takes 3-4 Weeks
This ships from Round Lake Beach, Illinois. A suburb outside of Chicago.
I use UPS and sometimes US Post.
This painting is titled Metope. It’s 18 x 18 inches, oil on gallery-wrapped canvas, and it’s one of the newer pieces I made in the last month or two. It’s based on one of the sculpted metopes from the entablature of the Parthenon—the section that shows a dramatic battle between the Lapiths (mythological humans) and the Centaurs (part human, part beast). The original sculpture is in the British Museum, taken from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s, and Greece has been trying to get it returned ever since.
I’ve been teaching this sculpture in my humanities classes for years. I probably look at it more than a dozen times each semester, and over time, I’ve developed a personal connection to it. For me, it represents the ancient Greek idea of the Apollonian vs. Dionysian—the struggle between reason and chaos, civility and animal instinct. It resonates a lot with the world today, especially in how we try (and sometimes fail) to stay balanced as a society.
The pose of the central figure is what really drew me in. Even without the heads, the figures are incredibly expressive. There’s a term for it—eurythmic gesture—which means the bodies are posed for maximum aesthetic beauty. One of the figures looks like he’s mid-pose in a kind of ancient battle vogue, right before delivering a fatal blow. It’s theatrical and beautifully composed.
Most images of classical sculptures are pretty lifeless and gray, but I didn’t want to do that. Instead, I painted this with a more impressionistic eye—focusing on how color actually appears in marble under different lighting. I used stiff bristle brushes and visible strokes to build up texture, and you can see how the paint application echoes the chisel marks in the original relief.
The surface is active and layered—areas like the torso and limbs are more clearly defined, while other parts are flatter and more abstracted. There’s a push and pull between realism and stylization throughout the piece. I wanted the brushwork to feel alive, not overly polished. Everything is close-cropped to keep the focus on the action and tension between the forms. The composition is dense, almost like a sculptural collage, and every inch of the canvas is used to heighten the sense of movement.
FREE SHIPPING Shipping takes 3-4 Weeks
This ships from Round Lake Beach, Illinois. A suburb outside of Chicago.
I use UPS and sometimes US Post.
This painting is titled Metope. It’s 18 x 18 inches, oil on gallery-wrapped canvas, and it’s one of the newer pieces I made in the last month or two. It’s based on one of the sculpted metopes from the entablature of the Parthenon—the section that shows a dramatic battle between the Lapiths (mythological humans) and the Centaurs (part human, part beast). The original sculpture is in the British Museum, taken from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s, and Greece has been trying to get it returned ever since.
I’ve been teaching this sculpture in my humanities classes for years. I probably look at it more than a dozen times each semester, and over time, I’ve developed a personal connection to it. For me, it represents the ancient Greek idea of the Apollonian vs. Dionysian—the struggle between reason and chaos, civility and animal instinct. It resonates a lot with the world today, especially in how we try (and sometimes fail) to stay balanced as a society.
The pose of the central figure is what really drew me in. Even without the heads, the figures are incredibly expressive. There’s a term for it—eurythmic gesture—which means the bodies are posed for maximum aesthetic beauty. One of the figures looks like he’s mid-pose in a kind of ancient battle vogue, right before delivering a fatal blow. It’s theatrical and beautifully composed.
Most images of classical sculptures are pretty lifeless and gray, but I didn’t want to do that. Instead, I painted this with a more impressionistic eye—focusing on how color actually appears in marble under different lighting. I used stiff bristle brushes and visible strokes to build up texture, and you can see how the paint application echoes the chisel marks in the original relief.
The surface is active and layered—areas like the torso and limbs are more clearly defined, while other parts are flatter and more abstracted. There’s a push and pull between realism and stylization throughout the piece. I wanted the brushwork to feel alive, not overly polished. Everything is close-cropped to keep the focus on the action and tension between the forms. The composition is dense, almost like a sculptural collage, and every inch of the canvas is used to heighten the sense of movement.
