This piece is about the fragile power of emotional honesty. There’s tension in the space between the elements, both physically and symbolically. The heart hovers like an offering, or maybe a burden. Its edges are raw, its warmth still burning. Smoke trails upward, suggesting something recently severed, or something still alive despite the odds.
InHumanity, I wanted to explore the vulnerability that comes with holding space for love and loss at the same time. The piece isn’t about a singular event—it’s about a condition. A state of being. What does it mean to be human when we carry both wound and wonder in the same breath?
As with the rest of myOracles series, this painting is rooted in symbolic gesture. The hand isn’t grasping—it’s steadying, maybe inviting. There’s no control here, just presence. The anatomical precision of the figure contrasts with the glowing organic mess of the heart, a nod to the paradoxes we carry: logic and emotion, choice and consequence, the personal and the collective.
This piece is an altar to our contradictions. To the ache that teaches. To the heart that still smokes from past fires, and still pulses forward.
Rendered in oil with warm, natural tones and subtle textures, the painting seamlessly blends realism and symbolism, inviting reflection. Like many works in theOracles series, it leaves space for the viewer’s narrative to emerge.
Danny Schreiber is a figurative painter, tattoo artist, musician, and founder of The Copper Wolf Tattoo Studio and Art Gallery based in Tumwater, WA. He holds a BFA in Illustration from the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude and is the 2025 Robert B. McMillen Foundation MAC Award winner. Using oil and graphite, Danny blends classical techniques with contemporary symbolism to craft visually intricate and emotionally resonant images that invoke contemplation and reflection in viewers.
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Oracles is a body of work that explores how identity is shaped and fragmented through systems of power, and can be reclaimed through reflection and courage. These paintings are not literal narratives but emotional reliquaries—portraits of memory, inheritance, and transformation. At their core, they ask: what parts of ourselves were we told to sever in order to belong? And what might still grow back?
Figures reference classical Greek sculpture, a nod to the Western ideals and philosophical roots that continue to shape cultural norms. However, the compositions fracture those ideals. Torsos are incomplete, objects hover, and backgrounds dissolve into voids. Each image holds tension between realism and surrealism, control and vulnerability, flesh and myth.
The Oracles are not simply about harm or conformity. They are about complexity. About what it means to live with contradiction. Each piece holds space for both the pain of what was lost and the potential of what remains. Rather than offering resolution, the paintings function as quiet questions. What was cut away? What was planted? What still pulses, even beneath the surface?
This series emerged from my own lived experience, but it extends outward, toward anyone who has felt shaped by expectation, silenced by care, or fractured by love. It is an offering, not of answers, but of witness.
Oracles invites viewers to pause and reflect. To see not just the figures on the panel, but their internal landscapes mirrored back to them. In that space between image and viewer, something else becomes possible: empathy, recognition, and maybe even regeneration.
Colors vary from screen to screen and are represented as accurately as possible. The oil paint and glossy, protective varnish creates shimmering textures depending on the angle of the viewer.
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