11: Propeller

Read the introduction to this series.

*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.

*The Middle Way*
Oil on canvas
20 x 16 inches
2025

Next:

Jessica Helfand|The Icarus Diaries

12: Scout

Read the introduction to this series. Sometimes when I slow down, strange things start to happen. Random associations. Curious deviations. I start to make mistakes, and (I think) the paintings become more interesting. Honor thy error as a hidden intention. (Brian Eno in Oblique Strategies.) I consider gravity—as in the graveness of the situation, and the … Continued

Observed