Face of God

Medium: Acrylic. 6 x 7

Date: 2014

Every artist has his/her own unique artistic process. For me, to start a picture, I look at the paper and try to see if some small lines are prominent. Sometimes I see a figure, small or large. Other times, I only start with a few lines which I follow with a pencil - a figment of fantasy that I pursue quietly. This figure might take a few months to show up, as it did in the case of this picture.

Carl Jung, a father of psychiatry, said to follow a figment of fantasy as far as you can. This is like playing cards in a game of solitaire. At Disneyland’s Epcot Center in the Pavilion of Imagination, the visitor follows a little dragon named Figment who guides them through all kinds of imaginations: visual, musical, written.

If the lines feel right to me, I keep following them even if the figure takes a while to show up. I trust some lines to be the right ones even when I do not know where they are leading and to what kind of image I do not know.

The large figures of the rider and horse appeared on the paper first. As I worked on them, the wheel emitting rays showed up. I accepted it and traced it where it appeared. Later, I read that the horse, rider, and wheel can be symbols of the sun. Here these symbols can also picture a mythological god.

The tiny figures of Adam and Eve are leaving Paradise and heading for the seashore where there is a rowboat named Cythera. Cythera is the name for the island on which Venus was born (in Greek mythology). Cythera symbolizes physical love and passion, which could be the next adventure for Adam and Eve.

Masaccio and Watteau are two of my favorite artists. Masaccio (1400-1427) was the first renowned artist of the Italian Renaissance. His portrayal of Adam and Eve has been considered the greatest ever done. He happened to die in a knife fight. His fresco which I copied is in Florence.

Watteau (1697 - 1734) was the first leading artist of the French Rococo. His large oil painting, Embarkation for Cythera, is in Berlin. It shows a group of folks headed for the island of love, for a picnic. Adam and Eve had been painted nude. The leaves covering them done for later centuries have recently been removed.

This acrylic painting on canvas is 6 x 7 feet. It copies a small watercolor done 25 years earlier drawn in a period of months prior to and after my first visit to Puerto Rico. I had never seen such fluffy big clouds as I saw on the island.

The huge clouds full of rain were added to my watercolor after that visit. In that early small watercolor, there were many figures representing the religions of the world in Egypt, Greece, Southeast Asia, native people of America, and Europe. Here I dispensed with the figures representing those lands.

With this large painting I made Adam and Eve prominent and added the rowboat named Cythera. I wanted Adam and Eve to have a place to go even if they had to row their own boat.