Jessica Helfand|The Icarus Diaries
March 30, 2026
11: Propeller
Oil and cold wax on canvas
60 x 48 inches
2026
David Moolten imagines Icarus as an immigrant, adrift on a wayward voyage:
He doesn’t fall into the sea, but back
Toward Russia
Bill Callahan imagines him in hiding:
Young Icarus flew at night for years
He flew and flew and flew …
As obsessed with evolution as ever
From a hill behind a gas station in Scranton
The (late, great) American poet Edward Field imagines Icarus still alive somewhere, living a quiet, anonymous life:
What was he doing aging in a suburb?
And later:
He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically,
And dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero;
But now rides commuter trains,
Serves on various committees,
And wishes he had drowned.
(Gutting.)
For some reason, this made me want to paint Icarus as a kind of Norman Rockwell–esque schoolboy, his head crowned by a thinking cap topped by two spinning feathers.
Field continues.
Can the genius of the hero fall
To the middling stature of the merely talented?
“Middling” stature—also gutting. Ovid explains that Daedalus advised Icarus to stay away from the heat of the sun by telling him to fly “the middle way”.
No one aspires to the middle.
Oil on canvas
20 x 16 inches
2025
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By Jessica Helfand
Jessica Helfand is an artist and writer based in New England. A former critic at Yale School of Art and one of the founding editors of Design Observer, she is the author of several books on visual culture including Self Reliance, Design: The Invention of Desire, and Face: A Visual Odyssey. jessicahelfand.com
