Wendy Artin, watercolor of Aphrodite of Rhodes, holding hair, 2012

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STONE FROM DELPHI

WENDY ARTIN & SEAMUS HEANEY

The Gallery at Arion Press, San Francisco 2012

Gallery show of the watercolors created for the Arion Press (San Francisco) fine arts letterpress edition entitled Stone From Delphi, featuring the Irish Nobel Laureate poet Seamus Heaney’s poems on classical subjects accompanied by watercolors by the American artist Wendy Artin. As the critic Helen Vendler makes clear in her introductory essay to that volume, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Sophocles, and Aeschylus have all been important influences on Seamus Heaney; the forty-nine poems included in the volume are drawn from seventeen of Heaney’s books, from 1966 to the present. Artin’s thirty-five meticulous and virtuosic watercolors of classical statues embodying subjects referred to in Heaney’s poems renew the ancient conversation between the visual arts and poetry.

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