Winged Victory Riding a Tiger

As 2022 draws to a close, I am so happy to present “Winged Victory Riding a Tiger”. I have been working on this piece on and off for most of the year, this being the Year of the Tiger after all. The idea began nearly three years ago, when I became fascinated by Eugéne Delacroix’ lithograph “Royal Tiger”. I was researching beautiful examples of printmaking as I was then embarking on my very first lithograph. Delacroix is a painter that I have long admired. His colors are ravishing and the dramatic compositions are operatic. What I really love are his sketches and watercolors, especially those from his travels in North Africa, and of course the tigers. It’s charming to read that he studied big cats at the Paris zoo prior to creating this lithograph. I too observed the tigers at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park as a preliminary for this painting, the one I particularly liked was named Diana. The figure of Victory perching on the tiger’s back is a nod to ancient Greek mosaics depicting Dionysus sometimes accompanied by the figure of winged Victory (Nike) on a chariot drawn by tigers. It is also a reference to an older painting of mine, “Baby Dionysus Riding a Cheetah”. The body of work I created for 2022 concentrates on the theme of “Borderlands” – that liminal space between light and dark, beauty and danger. “Winged Victory Riding a Tiger” was curiously central to that whole narrative and inspired all the other paintings created this year.