Byzantium

For over 1,000 years Greece was part of the vast Byzantine Empire, established  in 330 A.D.  by the Emperor Constantine, who moved the capital of the Roman Empire eastwards to a small town named Byzantium in modern-day Turkey.  Renamed and transformed into Constantinople, Byzantium would later lend its name to an empire of splendor and power the endured for more than a millennium.  Greek replace Latin as the language of the empire, and Greece itself was home to important centers of theology, scholarship, and artistic production. This painting explores those elements between the east and the west during our final days in the 21st century. 

"Today it's possible to paint one canvas with the calmness of an ancient Greek and the next with the anxiety of a Van Gogh.  Either of these emotions, and any in between, is valid to me...I work on many canvases at once.  In the morning I line them up against the wall of my studio (or on the table or the kitchen counter or the bathroom).  Some speak, some do not.  They are my mirrors. They tell me what I am like at that moment."  -William Bazotes