A worked out oil surrealistic painting variation of the last of the ’13 variations on the same theme’ graphite pencil drawing series. I added the world under her so I wouldn’t have that much dark negative space. It sort of got a ecological theme by it, so I called it Gaia. The beams in the upper left corner I added for the same reason: to get rid of as much as unwanted negative space as needed. A daft motif I know but it is proof that upscaling a small drawing offers new challenges: a larger scale needs to show more than a small size canvas.
The things is that I saw the elephant first. As a child I was fascinated by the concept of multistable perception, induced by ambiguous images. I remember a portrait of Sigmund Freud also looking like a nude woman, called ‘What’s on a man’s mind’, hanging as a poster on my aunt’s bathroom. Now that I am a full grown man I made a whole range of art works throughout the years based on this principle like:
The Venus of The Hague – 23-07-20
The Venus of The Hague – 09-07-20
The Restoration of Bettie Page – 01-04-20
The Revelation of Bettie Page (2018)
11 Bestial Qualities – 09-02-19
an Archeological Memory of Bettie Page – 13-11-18
The Return of the Dutch Elephants – 12-07-17
The mythical appearance of Alexis de Roode at Voorburg – 15-05-17 (sold)
One thing leads to another and not long after that I saw the flamingo head. Then I decided to complete the whole body by adding as much animals I could tuck in, like there a blue whale, two moon fish, a male mallard duck, a small bear, a meercat. M my cat ‘Furia’, I added last. As stated before such a package comes with a rather ‘stacked feeling’. Hence the planet earth I painted at the bottom and the theme ‘Gaia’, the ancestral mother of all life, was inevitable. Thus she is the personification of Earth.
Click here to read about the sale of this art work to a dutch collector.
Click here to read about the sale of a print through cupick.com.
Click here to read about the sale of a print through noirgallery.com
Oil on wood panel (85 x 120 cm)
Artist: Corné Akkers
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