Medal of Honor
from The Triumph of Romanticism
12" x 9"
acrylic on canvas
2015
Private Collection, Houston, Texas
Exhibitions
Nicole Longnecker Gallery, Houston, Texas, The Triumph of Romanticism, September 10 - October 15, 2016
 

Medal of Honor isolates the highest U.S. military decoration—rendered with reverent precision and chromatic clarity. The five-pointed star, laurel wreath, eagle, and celestial ribbon form a visual system designed to sanctify valor. The canvas doesn’t interpret the medal. It exposes its architecture.


Within The Triumph of Romanticism, this piece operates as a concentrated glyph—small in scale, monumental in charge. The allegorical figure of Minerva, the word VALOR, the stylized eagle—all function as emotional machinery. The work doesn’t question heroism. It reveals how heroism is manufactured, mythologized, and made sacred.

This isn’t a tribute. It’s a mechanism. Medal of Honor reveals how valor is aestheticized, how sacrifice is codified into ornament, and how belief is manufactured through design. The canvas doesn’t honor heroism—it dissects the apparatus that makes it sacred. Within The Triumph of Romanticism, this is not decoration. It’s the emotional machinery of empire.