Icarus Sunstruck

Ayrton comments on his fascination with the Icarus myth; 'In 1958 I went to Crete for the first time, and flying there, in the opposite direction from that taken by Daedalus and his son five thousand years ago, I began to become involved in that legend. Between 1958 and 1962 I produced perhaps three hundred drawings, fifteen bronzes, a group of reliefs in various media and a dozen or so paintings, all centred on that epic flight. It is the myth which to me has the most relevance to our own time ... to make an image of the physical form of a man capable of flight, under his own power, is to produce a paraphrase of flight as an idea' (M. Ayrton, Michael Ayrton drawings and sculpture, London, 1962, pp. 88-89).