Circe, Poisoning ” x ” · Carbon pencil, blackening watercolours, and inks on paper mounted to canvas · [Year 2015–2025]
This painting reimagines Circe in a modern, intimate version of the myth: she lies face down on a soft surface, head raised and turned toward the viewer, hair wrapped in a soft blue towel as if just out of the shower. Her expression is calm and calculating, eyes sharp and focused, lips slightly parted in concentration as she plans her next move. In front of her sits a tablet, its screen glowing faintly, displaying digital tools or a recipe for something far more subtle than an ancient potion—poison conceived in code, in chemistry, in quiet thought.
No goblet appears; the act of poisoning is not yet physical. The blackening drips trail from the tablet's edges and her fingertips, spreading slowly across the canvas like digital ink bleeding into paper, or the slow seepage of intention into reality. The drips coil around her arms and towel, saturating the scene in shadow—symbolizing the inevitable transformation she is designing: men turned, desire twisted, power exercised without ever raising a cup.
Circe is radiant yet remote—goddess of enchantment remade in the everyday, her beauty a quiet weapon, her planning a form of seduction that needs no voice or touch. The tablet is her new wand, the towel her casual disguise, the bed her private laboratory. The viewer becomes the unseen Ulysses—already drawn in, already at risk—by the simple act of meeting her gaze.
The work confronts the complexity of modern enchantment: how persuasion can be silent and digital, how the planning of a trap can be as intimate as a late-night scroll, how the giver of change is herself changed by the act of creation. The blackening layers echo the gradual surrender—the idea already taking form, the consequence already spreading.
Yet in the deepest blackening, a faint gleam catches on the tablet's screen and in the corner of her eye—the quiet possibility that even in this modern poisoning, something essential remains: a choice, a reversal, a reclaiming that can still unfold.
A meditation on power, cunning, the thin line between preparation and poison in the digital age, and the enduring optimism that persists when we face the cup being planned in silence—dark yet eternally hopeful in its refusal to let the poison be the final truth.
Inquiries welcome for acquisition, studio view, or related works: blairaiken@raincage.com