Face of God

Medium: Acrylic. 6 x 7

Date: 2014

Every artist has a unique way in. For me, it starts with the paper itself, I look for small lines that feel prominent, waiting to see if a figure emerges. Sometimes it's there almost immediately, small or large. Other times I have only a few pencil marks to follow, a figment of fantasy I pursue quietly, not knowing where it leads. This particular figure took months to show itself.

Carl Jung, a father of analytical psychology, said to follow a figment of fantasy as far as it will take you, the way one plays out a hand in solitaire, trusting the sequence without knowing the final layout. At Epcot's Pavilion of Imagination, a little dragon named Figment guides visitors through exactly this: the visual, the musical, the written, all born from the same instinct to follow a line before you understand it. When the lines feel right, I keep following them, even without knowing what kind of image is waiting on the other side.

Symbolic Elements and Visual Design

The large figures of the rider and horse arrived on the paper first. As I worked them in, a wheel emitting rays appeared, and I accepted it, tracing it where it wanted to go. I later learned that the horse, the rider, and the wheel are all traditional symbols of the sun — together, they can also read as a mythological god.

Smaller and quieter, in the corner of the composition, Adam and Eve are leaving Paradise, walking toward a seashore where a rowboat waits, named Cythera, after the Greek island of Venus's birth. Cythera symbolizes physical love and passion, the adventure that may await them next. I wanted Adam and Eve to have somewhere to go, even if they had to row there themselves.

Artistic Influences

Two artists shaped this piece directly. Masaccio (1401–1428), the first great master of the Italian Renaissance, painted what many consider the finest Expulsion of Adam and Eve ever done , a fresco in Florence that I copied here, and a life cut short in a knife fight. Watteau (1684–1721), the leading figure of French Rococo, painted The Embarkation for Cythera, now in Berlin: a group setting off for the island of love on what amounts to a picnic. His Adam and Eve were originally painted nude; the leaves added by later, more modest centuries have since been removed.

Technique

This acrylic on canvas, 6 by 7 feet, is a large-scale return to a small watercolor I made twenty-five years earlier, painted in the months surrounding my first visit to Puerto Rico, where I saw clouds fuller and more dramatic than any, I'd encountered before. Those huge, rain-heavy clouds were added to the original watercolor after that trip. That earlier piece was more crowded: figures representing the world's religions from Egypt, Greece, Southeast Asia, the native peoples of the Americas, and Europe. In this larger painting, I let those figures go. Adam and Eve became the center of the composition, and I gave them their rowboat, a way forward, even into the unknown.

Reflection: A Life Lesson

I didn't know, when the rider and horse first appeared, that I was building toward an image of exile and desire, sun gods and rowboats. I only knew the lines felt right, and that trusting them was enough. Most of what matters in a life gets built the same way, not from a finished plan, but from a willingness to follow the figment as far as it will go, and to trust that Paradise lost is rarely the end of the story. There is almost always a boat.

What line are you still following, even without knowing where it leads?

Complexity. Dichotomy. Unity.