Adam (In the Garden) oil on canvas 2011

(revised from a journal entry about this painting, dated March 7, 2011)
I asked myself...who is that god-like man crowned in palm fronds?  Jesus Christ maybe?  Whoever it was, it was intimidating!  I'm not Michelangelo!  A whole cast of others before me have mastered the male form already--and why was it male in the first place? (no internal answer to that question satisfied!).  I decided to abandon this inquiry and just paint in the sky area of the image to find direction. I broadened strokes and narrowed others, keeping the backlit "realm of glory" as splendorous as I could. I increased the perception of distance, of landscape, of mist over water, adding textures and plant forms--all in the "scene" of the figure, gradually evoking enough sui generis "place in time" until it looked to me like the beginning of the World.  It looked to be a spiritual Eden, our Judeo-Christian paradise, radically bifurcated by the tree and foregrounded figure-- dazzling in its organic form, made in God's image, the creation who rents this world apart in catastrophic brilliance!  It's the Creation story I was taught as a child.  But where is Eve then? I pondered this question for awhile.  Aha, I know-- she's facing the brilliant distance, directly behind her male counterpart!  She faces the Light and the Birth of Creation, the unseen Wo-man who remains mysterious.
What struck me too about the figure's pose was that it had haunted me from a much earlier effort. I'd cast it aside as "not good".  I didn't know what to do with it.  It sat abandoned in my studio for over a year or longer.  But now the figure and the pose took on new meaning.  Finally I rendered the figure to the point where I had to decide the degree of detail to give the genitals,  and had the trouble of emphasis to sexuality. I decided that there could be no fig leaf, no concealment of sex--no shame at a time envisioned as predating the Fall.  No, what the pose of the figure revealed to me then, in it's profound 'stretch of nonchalance' was the inherent hubris of mankind-- the man who would be God.  Call it  Adam or Adonis, here he is, shading himself under the sheltering Biblical palm,  already confusing himself for God the Immortal.