Breaking the Chains of Eden

2018

Technique

Save for the reference used for the central figure, this was another piece painted completely from imagination. Originally, I wanted something with a grand scale—hence the mountain vista in the background—but that was quickly overtaken by the piece’s foreground elements.

I placed the figure in, for lack of a better term, in a psychedelicized embryo, directly between the two trees. I wanted the figure just off the road, as though they had stepped off the path they were provided and were moving toward the possibilities of another direction. That figure is the only thing I detailed in a crisp and more-or-less realistic manner, so that they served as the focal point, with the rest of the piece being more ill-defined in this moment of transition.

The last step was in detailing it, which involved connecting the central figure to the two trees with complex spiralling structures, as well as causing the central embryo to have branch-like structures emerging from it. Finally, I threw in some non-organic patterning into the sky, which is most visible in the top-left corner, to contrast the heavily organic focal point.