Portfolio > Digital Paintings

“Aurora Borealis” continues my exploration of Ancient Greek spiritual beliefs about the cosmos, creation, and the afterlife. It also further explores ideas from “Wine Dark Sea” (see “Wine Dark Sea” entry on this website).

Like so many of my artworks, this one also had a dual purpose as an independent artwork and as a demonstration to my digital painting students. One of the messages I always convey to my students is the importance of hand-drawn, hand-painted imagery—as opposed to tracing or copying-and-pasting of figures, images, etc. from other sources. If they do copy-and-paste, as I have done for this artwork, they should be willing to heavily rework, redraw, and alter the copy-and-pasted imagery. (Note: I typically copy-and-paste my own artwork, never photos or some else's artwork). For example, in this artwork, I copy-and-pasted three characters from other paintings: the left-most woman (see “Adrina Distracted”), the man sleeping (see “Daniel’s Dream” and “Wine Dark Sea”), and the man in the water (see “Iris’s Dream” and “Valentine”—standing male figure gesturing toward the standing woman), but I ended up repainting all of them extensively.

I did not “flip horizontally” “Wine Dark Sea” to start this artwork, but I did use poses that were 180 degrees opposite of those in “Wine Dark Sea;” the photographic references I used for my nude models feature 24 rotated views of the same pose of the same model, posed on a rotating platform. For the pose of the left-most figure in this artwork, I found the pose that was 180 degrees opposite of the woman, the second character in from the left edge of the composition in “Wine Dark Sea.” The pose of the fourth character from the left in "Aurora Borealis," the woman sitting on a stool looking at a woman sitting on the ground, is 180 degrees opposite of the third character in from the left, woman sitting on a rock with her back to us, in “Wine Dark Sea.”

I read somewhere that the North American Native American/First People's tribe, the Cree, believe that the Aurora Borealis shows souls of the dead dancing in the sky. This somewhat connects to Steiner’s ideas that I convey in “Wine Dark Sea,” that when we dream at night, it is not really a dream or vision at all but instead corporeal human souls every night leaving their bodies to commune and communicate with souls living in the life after death. In “Wine Dark Sea” the sleeping man’s soul leaves his body, distorts, and then melts into the sky. Unlike “Wine Dark Sea,” the sky in Aurora Borealis shows the allusion of souls in their life after death, dancing in the sky as the Northern Lights. I did not want to repeat the imagery of the sleeping man’s soul rising from his body into the sky as in “Wine Dark Sea,” so instead, I painted the sleeping man in “Aurora Borealis” the same colors as the sky and North Lights, hoping that the viewer makes the connection.

While painting “Wine Dark Sea,” I was reading “The Odyssey,” the passage about the “Lotus Eaters.” Their sleep and lethargy were the result of eating the narcotic lotus plant. Unlike Homer’s characters who were content to stay on the island with their fellow lotus eaters and think of nothing else except for satisfying their addiction, my languid characters have forgotten family, home, and country for a higher purpose: to seek to know higher worlds, or at least to consider coexisting and alternate realities.