Sharing my art with students of the classics reading ‘The Oresteia’, University of Florida.

From my painting A Many Splendoured Thing, figures evoking the Furies from 5th Century play The Oresteia by Aeschylus

This was a little wondering off the pathway, but as I was working a lot with Greek tragedy and performance in my painting A Many Splendored Thing, I somehow got chatting with Prof Victoria Pagan, expert in classic literature at the University of Florida in the US. She was focusing one of her undergraduate classes on The Oresteia, which is one of the plays that I refer back to a lot. In particular, with Splendored Thing, the Furies. So I shared my painting with her students using my painting as a trigger for discussion. So special, and I hope it made them enjoy The Oresteia as much as I do. The format and themes of these plays have been interpreted by me in the arrangement of the elements on my canvases for The Holy Ghost, my new exhibition in 2022. Thanks Victoria.

[Ed] Now I have added a postscript here about why I cannot find a book cover image to put in this post. It’s because of some of the more challenging ways that The Oresteia can be appreciated in the context of our times. So a few months later I’m adding this link to a pretty interesting article in The London Review of Books by Emily Wilson. Read it if you have time. In the place of one of the countless translations of The Oresteia by esteemed white men, here is a detail close up from my painting A Many Splendored Thing (Jan 2020 Carl Gopalkrishnan). Whenever I see this section of my painting I think of The Libation Bearers.