Category Archives: Cycladic Figures

Her Lap of Roses

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Acrylic on paper (1994)

Size (not documented, work now in private collection)

This painting was included in my series Breast Cancer: A Progress, though it is not about breast cancer at all but is simply a celebration of women. As I wrote at the time, it was included in the series to remind us of what we are fighting for against this devastating disease.

I provided the following background information for the show at Art Noise Gallery, Kingston, 1994.

Sources/Acknowledgements:

Centre panel: Botticelli (Italian, 15th century), Primavera (detail: lap of Flora)

Side panels, figures: Goddess figures from ancient cultures

Side panels, backgrounds: Paul Klee (Swiss, 20th century), Jardin de Roses

Heart and Science

Posted by npaul on

Acrylic on paper (2004)

Size: w 12″ x h 19″

“Between 2700 and 2400 B.C., roughly contemporaneously with Old Kingdom Egypt, craftsmen in the Cycladic Islands of Greece sculpted female nudes in marble whose elegance and simplicity was not to be seen again in art until the work of Brancusi and Modigliani.” (From The Cycladic Spirit, Masterpieces from the Nicholas P. Goulandris Collection, by Colin Renfrew with Introduction by Christos Doumas, 1991). Hard to argue with that statement. The folded-arm figures in this magnificent book were photographed by John Bigelow Taylor. For this painting I chose to work from one of Taylor’s photographs of the Chalandriani variety, a figure with squared off shoulders and a long cylindrical neck. The black box inserted into the figure’s chest is my addition of course, a CT scan image of the heart.