Within South Africa we courier your artwork to your door - the shipping cost will show at the checkout.
When shipping art internationally, two primary options are commonly considered: crated and rolled. Crating involves securely packaging the artwork in a custom-built crate, providing maximum protection against physical damage but often resulting in higher shipping costs due to size and weight. On the other hand, rolling art involves taking stretched paintings off the frame, carefully wrapping the artwork and placing it in a protective tube. This method is more cost-effective and suitable for flexible pieces. Choosing between crating and rolling depends on the specific artwork's size, fragility, and budget, as well as the destination's shipping requirements and regulations.
We will be in touch regarding the best options for you.
Virtual hanging of art is an innovative service we offer that allows art enthusiasts and collectors to visualize how artworks will appear in their desired spaces before making a purchase. We digitally place the selected artworks on your walls, in the correct scale to achieve the desired aesthetic. This service not only helps in making informed decisions but also enhances the overall art-buying experience, providing a realistic preview of the final result and ensuring that the chosen artworks harmonize with the surrounding decor. Please contact us to make use of this service!
This work is inspired by Calypso, the sea nymph of Greek mythology whose story is bound to isolation, longing, desire and the interruption of a journey. On the remote island of Ogygia, she offers Odysseus love, protection and immortality, yet ultimately becomes the figure who must release him so that he can return home.
The composition presents Calypso looking upward and beyond the frame, creating a sense of distance and emotional suspension. Her pose suggests waiting, yearning and contemplation, while the open space around her reinforces the isolation of the island. She appears caught between holding on and letting go, reflecting the emotional tension at the heart of her story.
The palette is dominated by soft blues, turquoise, pale grey and white, immediately connecting the work to the sea, sky and coastal light. These cool tones create an atmosphere of calm and beauty, yet there is also a sense of melancholy. The white drapery suggests purity, timelessness and classical mythology, while its weathered treatment prevents the figure from feeling idealised or distant.
Texture plays a significant role in the execution. The surface is cracked, eroded, layered and partially dissolved, recalling salt-worn stone, weathered walls and surfaces altered by sea and time. The figure seems to merge with the atmosphere, as if she is slowly being absorbed into the island that has become both her home and her confinement.
The work combines realistic portraiture with expressive abstraction. Her face remains sharply present, while areas of clothing and background dissolve into painterly fragments. This tension between clarity and disappearance echoes Calypso’s position between love and loss, permanence and departure, immortality and human longing.
In Calypso, the sea becomes both sanctuary and boundary. The painting captures the quiet moment before release — a figure surrounded by beauty, yet defined by the inevitability of separation.
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Stephen Symons
Stephen Symons
Stephen Symons was born in 1966 in Cape Town, South Africa, where he currently lives and works. Alongside his visual art practice, he runs a graphic design studio and works as a historian and author. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Pretoria, a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, and a National Higher Diploma in Graphic Design from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. He has had two solo exhibitions, titled Nutria, related to his PhD research at the Castle of the Cape of Good Hope (2017), and at the University of Pretoria (2018), and is an awardwinning author of poetry and short fiction.
Symons’s artistic practice engages the tradition of portraiture as a layered and contested archive rather than a fixed representation of identity. His works challenge the notion of the portrait as a complete and permanent record, instead presenting the face as something constructed through processes of accumulation, erasure, and revision.
Working entirely in a digital medium, Symons creates images that echo the visual language of classical painting and illustration. His compositions often draw on the structure and balance of Old Master portraiture, while his painterly surfaces are built through a highly tactile digital process using a pressure-sensitive tablet. Drips, textures, and gestures are rendered with precision, resulting in works that carry the depth and immediacy of physical paint. It is not uncommon for a single image to consist of over 100 layers, each contributing to a complex interplay of colour, texture, and visual depth.
The richly textured surfaces of his works function as visual palimpsests, built up and reworked to reveal traces of earlier stages. This process reflects his interest in the way history is continually rewritten, with the past remaining present through fragments and residues. By referencing classical portrait conventions while simultaneously disrupting them, Symons questions ideas of visibility, memory, and who is remembered.
Through fragmentation and material tension, his work reflects the complexity of identity and historical truth, inviting the viewer to consider the portrait not as a fixed image, but as an evolving record shaped over time.
Stephen Symons is in South Africa exclusively represented by The Artists Gallery in Cape Town and will show 2026 for the first time internationally with The Travelling Art Gallery.
