12 x 9"
oil on panel
sold
sold
If I start by saying the artist, Thomas Hart Benton, has long been a personal favorite of mine, you think 'yah, yah, sure, sure. Who isn't a favorite artist of hers?' But when I was 15 years old, I painted a long mural in the theme of American history, in a high school I attended in Warminster, Pennsylvania and based the entire painting in the style of Thomas Hart Benton. The mural was, to the best of my memory, about 30 feet wide. Benton's painting Achelous and Hercules featured in my new piece is over 22 feet wide by 5 feet high. It's magnificent.
Taken from the Smithsonian Museum of American Art's description says it best "Intense colors and writhing forms evoke the contest of muscle and will
between Hercules and Achelous, the Greek god who ruled over the rivers.
In flood season, Achelous took on the form of an angry bull, tearing new
channels through the earth with his horns. Hercules defeated him by
tearing off one horn, which became nature's cornucopia, or horn of
plenty. Thomas Hart Benton saw the legend as a parable of his beloved
Midwest. The Army Corps of Engineers had begun efforts to control the
Missouri River, and Benton imagined a future when the waterway was
tamed, and the earth swelled with robust harvests.
Benton's mythic
scene also touched on the most compelling events of the late 1940s.
America's agricultural treasure was airlifted to Europe through the
Marshall Plan as part of Truman's strategy to rebuild Europe and contain
communism. Benton may have been thinking of his fellow Missourian's
legendary stubbornness when he described Hercules as "tough and strong"
with "a reputation for doing what he thought was right."Please click here for a larger view.