Quent Cordair Fine Art

Step 1 (Icarus1)

Every once in a while, an idea is just big enough that it warrants a little more planning than usual.  Such is the case with a composition involving Icarus that I have had on the back burner for some years now.  Eventually, the painting will be a multiple-figure composition depicting Icarus landing triumphantly in Sicily to the amazement and relief of the onlookers.  Obviously I am taking a bit of artistic license with the original Greek story which goes something like this:
Daedalus, a famed inventor, problem solver and mere mortal is imprisoned with his young son on the island of Crete.  In order to escape, Daedalus spends years engineering and building a set of wings for himself and his son, Icarus which they will use to fly to Sicily.  Limited by the available materials, Daedalus fashions the wings using wax to attach the feathers to their framework.  By the time the wings are ready, Icarus is an adolescent.  As they prepare for their flight to freedom, Daedalus warns Icarus of the design limitations of their flight apparatus:  Fly too close to the water, and the feathers will get wet and become too heavy to fly.  Fly to close to the sun and the wax will melt resulting in a fatal fall to the ocean below.  In the original story, Icarus is overcome with the ecstasy of flight and, forgetting his father’s warning, flies too close to the sun and falls to his death.  In my version, Icarus respects the physical limitations of his father’s wings and successfully makes the trip to Sicily.
I will leave the details of the final painting for an Artist’s Studio installment in the future.  This study will be a much smaller painting featuring only the figure of Icarus and an extremely simplified background.  Why the study?  While in New York last summer attending a seminar at the Grand Central Academy, I met a model who perfectly fit the bill for my image of Icarus.  I took the opportunity to shoot some very excellent scrap of him posing as if just touching down from flight.  Of course, he wasn’t equipped with wings, and shooting the scrap on the fly in an unfamiliar studio, I had no opportunity to come up with even the crudest mock-up for the reference photos.  As a result, I am painting this study to work out the design of the wings, their coloration, texture, attachment to the figure and the lighting so that when I get around to painting the final piece everything will fall right into place.
The first step was to do a sketch of the figure from several pieces of reference material and then work a rough idea of the wing design into the drawing.  The figure and even the design of the wings don’t have to be absolutely perfect at this point…just close enough that any work on the lighting etc. will translate smoothly over to the final composition.  This is the drawing I ended up transferring to the canvas…an adventure in and of itself.  Stay tuned….