Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses 18” x 24” · Carbon pencil, blackening watercolours, and inks on paper mounted to canvas · [Year 2020–2025]
This painting captures the moment Circe offers the poisoned cup to Ulysses. She stands alone in the center of the composition, one hand extended with the glass, the other resting lightly at her side. Her gaze is calm and knowing, lips curved in a subtle, inviting smile, eyes fixed on the unseen Ulysses who is felt but not visible in the frame. The goblet is held forward, its rim tilted slightly toward the viewer, the liquid inside swirling with dark promise.
Blackening drips trail from the cup’s edge, falling in slow, deliberate lines that pool on the floor and spread outward across the canvas like spilled ink or wine. The drips stain the ground beneath her feet and creep up the hem of her gown, symbolizing the poison’s inevitable reach: not yet taken, but already beginning to saturate the space. Circe is radiant yet remote—goddess of enchantment, her beauty a lure, her hospitality a trap disguised as generosity.
The work confronts the complexity of the offer: how temptation can be gentle and absolute, how the cup can be both gift and curse, how the act of extending it strips away will without force. Ulysses is absent from the image, yet his presence is everywhere—in the direction of her gaze, in the tilt of the goblet, in the silence that waits for his hand to reach. The blackening layers echo the gradual surrender—the potion’s effect already present in the air between the offer and the acceptance, the transformation inevitable once the cup is taken.
Yet in the deepest blackening, a faint gleam catches on the rim of the goblet—the quiet possibility that even in the face of enchantment, something can resist, remember, or turn the spell back on itself.
A meditation on power, temptation, the thin line between hospitality and domination, and the enduring optimism that persists when we face the cup we are offered—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