Beloved and God #3

Posted byEdward FicklinPosted inPaintingTags:,
Image of painting, Beloved and God #3
Image of painting, Beloved and God #3

2020, 10 in. x 7 in.
Gouache on paper

The third in a series of paintings inspired by the history and legend of Antinous during the early Roman empire. Surviving statuary is breathtakingly consistent in depictions of his beauty.

Here I explore beauty as a call to both worship and obedience—however hard we might try to resist this tendency. A tiny bit of modern leather imagery mixed with the classical bridges the past and present.

The title of this series in an homage to the spectacular work of scholarship by Royston Lambert.

Published by Edward Ficklin

Edward Ficklin (he/him), maverick artist not afraid to say gay, is a self-taught painter, writer, publisher and sometimes technologist. He creates sensuous and erotically-tinged queer surrealist art, publishes queer-centered sci-fi comix, and pontificates regularly on a range of topics in his Queer Quantum Dispatch newsletter.