Ozymandias, Second Son
Artist: Maxwell Schenkel
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Acrylic Mural
December 10, 2021
Murray Carriage House Walls
Approx. 25ft (length)
A colorful, two wall mural displayed across the corner of a room. “Ozymandias, Second Son” includes bold pops of colors contrasted with prominent black shapes. Schenkel mixes human, mechanical, and natural forms in his vibrant, colossal composition.
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Maxwell Schenkel is part of the Class of 2022, and a double major in Neuroscience and Studio Art. An active artist for years, Schenkel is also a member of the Music Guild.
From the Artist:
Ozymandias, The Second Son, is a monument to a particular vignette within my larger artistic journey of alleviating existential pressure: the first time I dared to paint on the walls of my off-campus house. It was there where my previously decorative tendencies and apprehension to make large, engaging visual work completely transformed into a rather obsessive drive to become deeply familiar with a given space and then shape it into the most immersive form of my fantasy. The more time I spent filling the negative space of the house’s walls, the more familiar I became with an unfamiliar state of deep introspection and meditation that brought about substantial transformations in my life during a time of great social isolation. The current mural is the next step forward in the larger narrative. It is an aesthetic and conceptual evolution to my off-campus room that pushes my ambition and fears to their absolute limit, using artistic process as a catalyst to confront the unknown within myself. This mural is a visual diary that embodies the exhilarating instability of my internal dialogue and the struggle to find balance in artistic paradoxes: freedom and refinement, representational and abstract, colorful and colorless, ad infinitum. In order to develop further, it is necessary for me to pass through this internal tension, for at the other side of that struggle lies something unknown yet beautiful and unique.
Thankfully, others walk this path alongside me. In Ozymandias, Second Son, I am utilizing an artistic approach that has been applied time and time again throughout human history, since the first cave paintings of Altamira to the iconic graffiti murals of Keith Haring. As such, this mural does not exist in a vacuum, but rather in a flowing stream of infinite discourse between individuals searching for the unreachable transcendent. Somehow, upon these walls, I hope to make a perseverant testament to the efforts of these artistic idols and my intimately subjective response to them.
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“I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—’Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’”
Article by: Sindey Amar