Rage of Achilles (Painting)

Here is my finished painting on October 2, 2025. It was time to turn it in for the special "Homer" event at Porter Mill which featured paintings inspired by the Iliad and the Odyssey. I wanted to participate in this because the Iliad was one of the first books I read when I began graduate school in Comparative Literature and also because I think the Iliad still has important things to say to us even now..

Over the past year, I have produced several literary-themed paintings, and this painting will be part of that series. My little "literary series" came about by chance because of a number of art shows with literary themes that I participated in over the past year or so. So now I have done paintings related to "Moby Dick", "Alice in Wonderland", "The Scarlet Letter" and a "Midsummer Night's Dream," and now Homer's "Iliad". These paintings are all the same size (20 x 20), and done in the same style. I hope to exhibit them together at some point. And I hope to paint more.

This painting is a representation of the shield of Achilles, but instead of being engraved with fantastical images (as in Homer's poem), it is inscribed with Homer's words: the opening line of the "Iliad," as translated by Robert Fagles.:

"Rage -- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls."

So this how my painting looked on October 2nd, the day I finished it. In the intervening days, I had made changes, large, small, and invisible to the naked eye. I added a few layers of gold metallic paint to the border of the shield. I mixed the same paint with acrylic medium so I could add more layers of gold to the body of the shield without obscuring the lettering. And I added some white to the background, using soft circular strokes to suggest clouds in the sky.