14: Puppet

Read the introduction to this series.

I am picturing Icarus as a choir boy, isolated against a bright background as though pulled from a lineup. Ringlets, voice still high, dressed to fit in with the chorus. The gaze is downward, uncertain, mercurial.

The sun casts its shadows. Harbingers of heliotropic doom. A boy in the (long) shadow of his father but the (short) shadow of the moment.

Here the light comes from above, glistening on the hair. The background is deliberately empty, warmed by the sun, a searing yellow-grey. The collar melts a little. The hair coils tighter.

Early in this process I remember reading that Icarus had red hair. I began experimenting with warmer hues—transparent reds and ochres and glazes of brown—and it stuck. Now, as I inadvertently cycle through so many iterations, that tonality has remained. 

There is, for me, a kind of visible pain in this painting. (Pain. Ting.)  

“Be patient and tough,” Ovid wrote in 16 BC. “Someday this pain will be useful to you.”