Painting the Panorama

Panopea - Oil on canvas, 120 x 60cm,

“Lightly skims the dark-blue chariot of Poseidon over the sea's face: . . . then come his retainers . . . on the left are Thetis and Melite and maiden Panopea” - Virgil, Aeneid V

My latest painting in my series of works inspired by the mythology of the sea is “Panopea” It is a wide, all-encompassing view of the sea with a distant horizon.

Panopea was the Nereid nymph or goddess of the sea's broad panorama. Her name means "all-seeing" from the Greek words pan and ops and she was associated with the sighting of land and approaching storms by sailors. In the years before the introduction of modern tools such as global positioning system (GPS) devices, sailors depended on a clear panoramic view of the horizon to navigate the ocean. The sun's position to the horizon told sailors what time of day it was and what direction they were sailing.