Spiral, 2023, oil on linen, 48 x 36"

Swept in time’s tide, her Oedipus and the Sphinx sets a bright and primary palette against the dusty gray of ancient mythology, breathing new life into the wisdom of old stories, and reminding us of the Delphic mysteries of age and mortality. Once, classical sculpture was painted in cheerful hues over marble white, and Gram revitalizes the bleached version of the past with color. Gram’s sphinx is a reinvention. “I used the classical human face,” she says, “the idealized, romantic face from Renaissance style, rather than a very realistic style, because I felt it would suit the work more. It would take the work out of the super-realistic and put it into the mythological type of realm, more of the classical realm.” The face of the multicolored sphinx—a monstrous beast with the head and breasts of a woman, the wings of an eagle and the body of a lion—who met translucent Oedipus on his journey to destiny. The stone is crumbling, as ticking time eats the eroding architecture of human culture.

Three Birds, 2024, oil on panel, 16 x 16"

King Oedipus’ story is wrapped in fate. His royal city of Thebes was overwhelmed by plague, and the oracle declared the pestilence would only end when the murderer of the previous King Laius was exposed and punished, for it was this crime that brought sickness to his citizens. Laius had been killed on the road from Thebes by an unknown stranger. Oedipus swore to discover, curse and exile the killer, and ordered the blind prophet Tiresias to tell what he knew. Desperate to avoid the horror the truth would reveal, seer Tiresias only revealed the murderer was father and brother of his own children, and son of his own wife.

White Egret, 2024, oil on panel, 16 x 16"

Soon compelled to the truth, Tiresias told Oedipus his true parents were King Laius and his Queen Jocasta. They had abandoned Oedipus to the wilderness when he was born because the oracle predicted that their son would kill his father and sleep with his mother. Determined to avoid this terrible destiny, they pierced the child’s heels and tied his feet together so he could not move (Oedipus means “swollen foot”), and ordered a shepherd to expose him on the mountainside, where he would be easy prey for predators of air and earth. But the shepherd pitied the child and took him instead to the court of the neighboring kingdom of Corinth, where he was adopted by the king and queen who raised him as their own son. When he became a young man, flourishing as a prince of the Corinthians, Oedipus went to the oracle to learn his fate, and was given the same appalling prediction—he would kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he confronted the king and queen, who lied, insisting they were his true parents. To escape his horrible destiny Oedipus fled to Thebes but, on his journey, he was challenged by an older man in a chariot who insisted he had the right of way at a crossroads. A fight broke out, and Oedipus killed the stranger and continued toward the city. 

Oedipus and the Sphinx, 2023, oil on linen, 54 x 80"

In those days, the Sphinx guarded the road to Thebes, confronting all who approached with a riddle: what walked on four feet in the morning, two feet in the afternoon and three feet at night? Travelers who failed to give the correct answer—and they had all failed until Oedipus arrived—were killed by the beast. But when the Sphinx met Oedipus, driven by the feet of fate, mortality and doom were already at the forefront of this anti-hero’s imagination, and he answered immediately that a man crawled as a baby, walked as an adult and leaned on a stick in old age. The Sphinx, horrified and outsmarted, leapt from a precipice to her own preordained date with death, and Oedipus continued, to meet and marry the recently widowed queen, whose husband had been murdered by a traveler at a crossroads on the highway. Oedipus had killed his true father Laius and married his mother Jocasta. Mortified, he stabbed his own eyes, joining tragic Tiresias in the clear vision of blindness.

Predator Drone, 2022, oil on linen, 48 x 52"

The clever and predatory Sphinx united a lethal trio of raptor, feline and woman, embodying the symbolic and mortal threats Oedipus faced when he was a cripple-tied baby abandoned to the wild by his infanticidal and doom-dodging mother. Oedipus answered the Sphinx’s deadly intellectual and physical threat by confronting her with the inevitable surety of time and death. The ineffectual triple threat was erased, and Oedipus was the agent of inescapable future. Oedipus was destiny, the ancient sphinx an enigma of delicious uncertainty.

Sky God, 2022, oil on panel, 16 x 16"

Her Spiral is a whirl of entangled imperial eagles and colorful corvids spinning in a mysterious rapture of energy suspended in space over a serene landscape. The composition is taken from a 15th-century panel painting, The Torment of Saint Anthony,attributed to a young Michelangelo (which was in turn a copy of an engraving by Martin Schongauer) but Gram’s raptors and rainbow jays take the place of hellish demons gyrating around the acquiescent saint. She explains, “Saint Anthony is fighting demons in the air, so I blended that with a natural history take on it. It’s the same landscape, but it includes birds and eagles fighting. Those are bald eagles, and in their mating ritual they grasp claws and twist to the ground in a spiral motion.” There is love and war in the heights, but life continues in the serene valley beneath. Far below the monstrous tangle, ordinary life continues in a peaceful view of a pleasant land, where the high torment of the holy man by these wild and imaginative demons goes unnoticed on the sailing skiff, and within the tall church towers, and beneath the soft shade of woodland trees. Although no people are visible, culture continues, oblivious to the cosmic struggle in the heavens. 

Night Vision, 2022, oil on linen, 54 x 80"

That peaceable kingdom spread open beneath the turmoil of temptation is a classic feature of altar paintings, which are portals to paradise, where heaven on earth is spread out behind portraits of religious figures, where Jesus and Mary and the saints occupy the space between the viewer and the promised land as reminders that there is no path to heaven but through their intercession. In the United States, the peaceable kingdom became part of the narrative of the God-blessed landscape, as painters as sophisticated as Thomas Cole and as simple as Edward Hicks, painted sublime illusions of virgin landscapes cast as a divine gift to Western expansion, and primitive visions of Eden filled with fantastic harmonies of the four-fold beasts of the creation. To Gram, the sacred landscape has a broad symbolic message. She says, “It could represent somewhere that you want to go, but you’re held back from, which could be paradise, and transcending that boundary that holds you back from that place.” 

Murmuration, 2021, oil on linen, 54 x 60"

The unicorn in Quintessence is among the mysterious creatures in Gram’s menagerie. Presently considered as an imaginary beast from fairytales fit for adolescent fantasies, the creature possesses a long and fascinating history of fundamental misunderstanding and an enviable iconography which intrigued her. She says, “I went on a unicorn tear. I wanted to do a classic unicorn, because today it’s a very pop art, cutesy, kitsch image. I wanted to make one that’s not like that, one that’s more classical, more Renaissance, because they were all over the place in Renaissance art, and they referenced multiple things. In that painting it’s stabbing a snake…It was originally a biblical reference, but that’s very archetypical, and you can apply your own self to the image—light versus dark, life versus death, human things.” The biblical unicorn was probably the source of all of the mythical beasts and probably born of a mistranslation. The Hebrew word “re’em” was translated as “unicorn,” but simply means a beast with one horn, and was probably a rhinoceros. Imaginative artists illustrating the Old Testament ignorant of the fauna of Africa created the horned horse, which soon became a heraldic emblem of royal houses as a symbol of strength and protection through God. Gram has hers killing the belly snake from biblical Eden, composed into an emblem of light’s victory over darkness. The unicorn shows how perennial symbols develop their own lives, unfolding over the span of time, born of strange circumstances. 

Quintessence, 2024, oil on linen, 32 x 52"

Gram’s studies Three Birds and White Egret are a departure from the allegorical power of her symbolic work into straightforward depictions of nature. She admires the American ornithologist John James Audubon and hopes to expand her commercial reach by appealing to buyers in the broader marketplace. And I suppose not everything she creates must have the allegorical burden of perennial iconography upon it. Let her mystical unicorn have her piercing magic horn, and let her panther leap with lantern-eyes, and let her pink hyena prey upon the predator drone. These pictures are laden with the existential weight of war and evil wonders, but sometimes a bird is but a bird, and to Gram it is enough, now, in this moment, to paint plumage to beauty and enjoy the bright pleasures of pristine and eternal nature. —