The Odyssey

Myth, Memory, and the Wine-Dark Sea

The Odyssey reimagined through celestial cartography, illuminated ornament, and mythic atmosphere. This collection approaches its characters and encounters as symbolic forces: wisdom, temptation, longing, survival, transformation, memory, and return.

The Odyssey explores the tension between wandering and belonging, knowledge and danger, forgetting and remembrance. It is ultimately a meditation on endurance across distance, time, and the unknowable forces that shape the journey home.

About the book

The Odyssey is a visual journey through one of the oldest stories we continue to tell. Drawing from Homer’s epic, the book moves through gods, monsters, temptation, loss, endurance, and the long journey home.

Rather than retelling the story literally, the images explore its characters and encounters as living ideas asking what these ancient figures might still have to say about being human.

The book also became part of the foundation for Between Shores, PiP Art Studio’s rock opera inspired by The Odyssey, where the familiar story is reconsidered through the voices of those Odysseus meets along the way.

Gallery

Between Shores

a rock opera inspired by the odyssey

The Odyssey, where everyone is the hero of their own story.

Monsters, sailors, women, and gods step forward to tell the stories Odysseus could not yet hear. More than obstacles. More than characters in someone else’s journey.

Until Odysseus awakes.

▶ THE COMPLETE ROCK OPERA

Details

Format

8.5 x 8.5 Hardcover

Author

Art and text by Paula Phelan

Year

2026

Pages

20 pages

Blog posts

The Odyssey and the Art of Returning Home

I attempted to read The Odyssey several times over the years. Each attempt ended the same way. I would make it a hundred or two hundred pages before the book slipped from my hands...

The Odyssey and the Art of Returning Home

I attempted to read The Odyssey several times over the years. Each attempt ended the same way. I would make it a hundred or two hundred pages before the book slipped from my hands...
Who Owns The Odyssey?

Every generation discovers a different Odyssey. That may be the secret of why Homer’s poem has remained alive for nearly three thousand years. It refuses to become a museum piece. It sails into every...

Who Owns The Odyssey?

Every generation discovers a different Odyssey. That may be the secret of why Homer’s poem has remained alive for nearly three thousand years. It refuses to become a museum piece. It sails into every...

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