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!
Across artistic traditions, Nebuchadnezzar’s madness is less about historical Babylon than it is about a universal and enduring theme: human arrogance brought low, the fragility of power, and the possibility of restoration through humility. His story becomes an allegory for the moment in which certainty collapses, and the individual is forced to confront both the limits of personal authority and the consequences of pride. This piece explores that theme after Nebuchadnezzar’s period of madness through portraiture, presenting the contemplative king after his sanity and kingdom have been restored. Traditionally, artists have focused on Nebuchadnezzar’s descent into madness. In contrast, this work deliberately considers the quieter, perhaps more psychologically complex moment that follows: a ruler returned to power but irrevocably changed by what he has experienced.
The most famous depiction of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness is William Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar (1795), in which the king is shown crawling naked and feral, his eyes wide with terror and insanity, stripped not only of his royal status but seemingly of his humanity. In contrast, this portrait presents Nebuchadnezzar after that transformation. His expression is subdued and introspective, suggesting a man who has regained his identity while carrying the memory of its disintegration.
The fragmented, distressed surface reinforces this sense of psychological reconstruction. Layers of scratches, stains, cracks and painterly marks partially obscure the face, suggesting the erosion of certainty and the traces left by suffering. Earthy ochres, burnt oranges, blacks and flashes of intense red evoke both the splendour of ancient Babylon and something scorched, damaged and unstable. The face emerges from this turbulent field rather than standing apart from it, implying that the king cannot entirely separate himself from the experience that has remade him.
King Nebuchadnezzar remains deeply tied to devotional practice and the idea of unfolding revelation, but situates these ideas within a re-imagined contemporary artistic space. The work becomes less an illustration of a biblical episode than a meditation on self-knowledge: on pride, collapse, recovery and the continual re-assessment of ourselves and the world we inhabit.
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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.
