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Rendering Niki of Samothrace. Acrylic, oil and pastel on paper, 55.8 x 88.3 cm.
Despite its significant damage and incompleteness, the Winged Victory (Niki) of Samothrace is held to be one of the great surviving masterpieces of sculpture from the entire Greco-Roman era. The statue shows a mastery of form and movement which has impressed critics and artists since its discovery. The loss of the head, while regrettable in a sense, is held by many to enhance the statue’s depiction of the supernatural.
This masterpiece has haunted me since my student years and I have done a lot of drawing and form studies upon it. In this particular one I made an effort to analyze its exquisite forms part by part, using only curves to describe their peerless rhythm and harmony.
As it could happen with music, rhythm and harmony, the two synthetic elements that are dominating in this work, dragged me to a meditative condition while working. This brought out a free and quite exaggerated rendering of the divine forms of the sculpture.