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"Longing Bends the Spine"
$3,100.00
- Title: Longing Bends The Spine
- Artist: Danny Schreiber
- Medium: oil on wood panel
- Year: 2025
- Size: 18 x 24 inch (45.72 x 60.96 cm)
This painting is part of my ongoing Oracles series, which explores how power—familial, institutional, spiritual—shapes and fractures personal identity. The figure depicted is a partial torso, its head and limbs removed, yet its musculature still pulses with quiet tension. It leans forward, not in collapse, but in yearning—caught in the posture of reaching for something it’s been told it cannot have.
The form emerges from a weathered tree trunk, suggesting the interweaving of growth and loss. In this visual language, trees act as metaphors for resilience: even when cut down or reshaped, they still contain memory. Likewise, the human body here holds the echo of a fuller self. The gesture is deliberately ambiguous—grief, reverence, desire. What is being sought, and what was sacrificed in the process?
My practice is grounded in classical realism and anatomy, but I intentionally distort or fragment the figure to invite psychological and symbolic readings. I use oil paint to layer soft light, subtle temperature shifts, and tactile surface, drawing viewers into an experience that feels intimate, almost mythic. Rather than depicting a specific story, this piece asks questions: What parts of ourselves were severed to survive? What still lingers in the bones? And what might regenerate, given the space?
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.
Details: This original artwork is a one-of-a-kind oil painting on an 18 x 24 inch wood panel framed in an ornate dark wood frame that measures 24 x 30 inches around the outside.
Artist: Danny Schreiber
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.
View all of his available art | Subscribe to his newsletter | Follow current projects @cognitronic
About the Oracles collection
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.
please note:
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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