A painting by me starts with inspiration originating in myth, pagan or Christian, the muse, that human presence that evokes in me the myth – and invariably a work of art I know.
For my picture Stealing Fire, Greg Louganis was the presence that evoked the myth of Prometheus, that champion of human-kind, known for his wily intelligence, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to us.
When I watched Greg dive, the work of art I had in mind was discovered when I was in my twenties, a burial monument named Tomb of the Diver after the enigmatic scene depicted on the covering slab of a naked youth soaring –almost floating- through a vast white sky clearing a scaffold of square stone blocks towards a wavy water surface below that I imagined was the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Beyond. The diver seemed small, a fleck in the composition, its perimeters clearly defined by black lines and decorative corners. Greg looked like the Paestum diver, a skydiving fleck in the vast Florida sky.
