March 20, 2023

Victory of the Seven Sisters
Bozeman, Montana
2023

In an email exchange with my friend Teresa a short while back I mentioned how impressed I was with the sculpture Winged Victory of Samothrace when I first saw it in the Louvre back in 2013.  After I sent her a photo of it that I had taken at the time, she commented she was surprised it hasn’t appeared in any of my composite images. Given how taken I was by the sculpture it surprised me as well. So I decided to remedy that situation and this is the result. Thanks for being my muse on this Teresa!

The impetus for this setting for Winged Victor came from a book by N. Scott Momaday I happened to be reading when I decided to work on this. In it he was recounting the story his Kiowa grandmother told him about the creation of Devil’s Tower. All the symbolism of that story and the background I had read about the Winged Victory of Samothrace all got mixed in together in my head along with my impressions on seeing the sculpture for the first time and this was the result. It doesn’t faithfully depict the Kiowa story nor the meaning of the sculpture. It is a synthesis of all those ideas into a new story in my head.