Donato Giancola The Golden Rose Oil on paper mounted on panel -2007 91.44 x 121.92 cm (36” x 3’ 12”) Private collection
Actually, the funny part of this painting is that he illustrated a scene that isn’t in the book fullstop. There is a shipwreck in the novel; the dead woman does in fact drown - and that’s where the connection ends. He told us in class that he wanted to find the height of this woman’s grief over the death of her friend, and so painted a scene that could have happened: her finding the corpse on the beach.
But the mermen started out as dead sailors. They were the wrong shape, though: Donato’s paintings are all about the abstract shapes building the greater structure, and those long shapes and loops just aren’t possible with human anatomy. So he added mermen, and created what I think of as one of his best paintings.
Donatoooooo
