Synkroniciti is excited to welcome visual artist Sarah Stone, a pop-folk painter based in California. Her painting “Icarus (Broken)” is a testament to human chutzpah. We see a beautiful young boy falling from the sky, eyes closed, arms flailing, feathers singed. It’s true that youth is often marked by pride, but sometimes this is required and even beneficial as life beats us down and refashions us into new versions of ourselves. We spend so much time warning young people against failure–of course, there are types of failure from which we cannot recover–that we fail to mention that failing can also teach us things. Sarah’s art is symbolist–a combination of fantasy and reality–and eye-catching. There is much to ponder here. Do we sometimes set up the failure of our children? Was it not Daedalus who built his sons wings? This has implications for climate change. It is our children who pay the price of generations of human hubris because we would rather see them burn than change our own course.
View “Icarus (Broken)” in our September 1st issue, “Broken,” available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Sarah Stone is a North American pop-folk painter living in a canyon outside of Los Angeles. She creates symbolist narratives about nature, dreams, and mythologies.
Icarus (Broken) references the classical story of a young man who, given a pair of wings, sets off with confidence, and no small amount of pride, expecting that everything will work out the way he thinks it will. And then he falls.
The story is about hubris, and frailty, but also invites a sense of life-affirmation. To know the future could see us “broken” opens us up to be present in every moment.