Venus

48 x 48 inch

Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans) was the Greek god of love or beauty. She was so lovely that Zeus was worried that the gods would go to war over her, so he married her off to Hephaestus (to whom she was not completely faithful), although she had an interest in Ares, ironically the god of war.

Myth had it she was born of the sea foam near Paphos, Cyprus, and floated inland on a scallop shell. Here Newberry seeks to find the truth in the lie, and depict the moment that inspired the poet to invent the myth-- the vision of a woman on the beach of the Agean, glowing in the radiance of the Grecian sunrise, the rocks behind her conjuring the idea of a shell, or a burst of sea foam.

This is the concluding piece in a series of mythological works (including God Releasing Stars into the Universe, Icarus Landing, Little Goddess, and Artemis, that spanned a decade of Newberry's career, primarily while he was living in Rhodes, Greece. Pastel and rock studies of Venus were drawn from life while on Rhodes, looking to the coast of Turkey in the distance. The painting was edited and finished in the years soon after Newberry returned to America.

BH 7-07-09