Andrew Ogus

When I was about seven or eight years old my family visited the remains of Pompeii, where the adult men were shown certain mysterious murals while the women and children waited in the ancient street. My circumspect father never told me what they were. Though I’ve seen Roman frescoes in reproduction, I still long to be in their presence.

Years later I saw Fellini’s Satyricon in Boston, and rode home to Cambridge on a tiny borrowed bicycle. There I was on a weird machine in a fabulous darkened city. Just like the movie.

For us, that world is mostly lost, broken statues and mosaics, faded murals, scraps of text. For them it was complete and modern. My life long fascination with story has led me to retell the mythologies of the ancient Greeks and Romans in gay male terms. What will remain of our lives in two thousand years?

When I began exploring this combination of printmaking and drawing, it was to celebrate the iconic beauty of men. It is also an attempt to capture those unseen Pompeiian paintings, those vanished lives, and ours.

I am always hoping to make something beautiful.

Three of my pieces appear in a new book, !00 Artists of the Male Figure.

These pieces are numbered sequentially in order of creation. The most recent pieces are displayed first.

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