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| "Hope (Eos, Bringer of Light)" Oil on paper on board, 20x16". |
Eos is the Goddess of the Dawn. A titan predating the Gods of Olympus, she rises each morning over the great river Oceanus. She lifts the veil of night to bring the light of the new day - to bring Hope.
What does it mean, to have Hope?
It means to have faith that Something Greater is yet to come.
Hope.
It’s a wonderfully human concept, as ancient as man himself.
We are faced with constant stress and duress, we find ourselves in circumstances that are far from ideal.
We are faced with decisions that place us between a rock and a hard place, with sometimes dire consequences.
What do you do when your fate throws you to the mercy of the wind?
When all that you have, all that you are, goes up in flames?
Do you wither away, resigning to defeat?
What do you do when the air has been sucked from your lungs, and you haven't the strength to stand?
You hold on to hope.
These metaphors can apply to everything that happens.
When fate wants to push you around, you stand your ground.
When fate wants to push you around, you stand your ground.
You plant two feet on the Earth and stand strong, like the rock that withstands the sea's harsh blows day after day.
You look to the skies - to the sun - and draw strength.
And each night - in the cold, in the dark - you hold on to Hope, with faith that the Sun will rise again.
The cycle of night and day is the embodiment of hope itself…that there will always be a new sun on the horizon.
A new beginning.
Hope.
On a Personal Note:
My personal life has been a direct source of thought and emotion behind my paintings for the last eight months, each image serving to document what my thoughts and feelings were at the time of conception. They also serve as a method to cope with those thoughts and emotions - thinking through what I was feeling through the act of painting.
Hope brings me full circle in a few ways.
Hesitance, Resignation, Pursuance, and now Hope are all tied thematically to the idea of Fate, and the outcomes possible when dealing with fate in various ways.
Hesitance and Resignation in many ways embodied a darker side of Fate. Pursuance began to break through those darker emotions, and had under it's dramatic surface a sense of hope and forward thinking.
Finally, Hope brings us face-to-face with the light, literally. I found myself returning to a mindset of hope in my own life, and what better way to illustrate this "return to form" for me than to go back to my roots and love of Greek Mythology?
I began to with Pursuance, that painting being very influenced by the Greek aesthetic and of course the use of a centaur.
But Hope returns to the mythology directly - a portrait of Eos - bringing me back to the series I began with Ares exactly one year ago.
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