Miner Kilbourne Kellogg, born Manlius - Scylla - n.d. - T-Shirt

A long pencil ridge of mountains runs almost the full width of a pale sheet, resting on a single horizontal line of sea.

Visual Elements & Composition

The range dominates the sheet. Its jagged ridgeline rises in several peaks, with the highest just left of centre, and the slopes are built from short, angled pencil strokes that read as folds and ravines. Two small rocky islets sit near the bottom edge, left of centre, set apart from the mountains by an open stretch of blank paper. The upper half of the sheet is left empty, which gives the range distance and scale. The palette is restrained: pencil grey on pale paper cream.

Meaning & Symbolism

Scylla is a headland on the Calabrian shore of the Strait of Messina, facing the whirlpool of Charybdis on the Sicilian side. In the Odyssey, the passage between them was one of the most feared in the Mediterranean. Kellogg drew the coast without figures or buildings, so the setting reads as wild and remote, shaped as much by legend as by travel. Kellogg, an American painter born in Manlius, New York, travelled in Europe and the Near East in the 1840s, and this sheet follows his habit of recording coastal profiles directly from the sea. The original is held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection.

On the Unisex Heavy Cotton Tee

A tee carries a wide, flat image across the chest, so a panorama like this one suits the garment. The long horizon line runs across the torso while the peaks rise above it, and the open paper above the ridge becomes the open space above the shoulders. Wear it and the landscape stays still and quiet, the way Kellogg's sheet does.