Another study for my next Singularity painting, with this Pandora opening a forbidden box from the "past"
She is joined by her friend and companion.
Some of you may remember the first iteration of this piece which began as this sketch
To which I added colour later on,
I have been thinking about this piece this past week. Having been very busy with my little Summer cottage tiny house that I am preparing for the Summer rental season, I allowed my coffee breaks from laying gravel path and planting more ferns (it's called Fern Cottage) to thinking about this creature.
As she is meant to be a play on Pandora, who famously opened the forbidden box (thought it was actually meant to be a jar but was mistranslated) this Greek woman, the first human woman created by the Gods, let loose from her jar/box all the plagues and horrors of the world. However, she was able to close it and all that remained was Hope.
This myth speaks volumes to me when I consider my little creatures of the future Singularity. Caught between human and machine, these creatures spend their days wondering of a past not quite rememberd. Having been made first with the attempts of the human race to stay abreast of the increasing intelligence and rapid procreation of the machines A.i., these beings find themselves somehow an amalgam of machine and biology.
When I consider this future fantasy world I am painting I can't think of a more fitting heroine then a "Pandora"; perhaps the first 'hybrid' made by the Machine Gods.
She is letting loose the terrors of the machine world (as @winstonalden jokingly suggested, her opening an old PC and letting loose some bad Windows upgrades and virus) Will she close it in time to keep Hope alive? And is it Hope for a new kind of humanity, or for the continuation of the machine? Who can say?
From my initial sketch she has remained the same, only I have toyed with her dress colour. I also added the butterflies again, as I did in Singularity Dream, as they have always been a representation of the Human Soul and Psyche.
And of course, I can't have our future version of humanity without the ever faithful companion: the dog.
In this world I imagine the legions of dogs, pets for millennia, finding themselves left without humanity but perhaps licking the metal hand of the new beings or nuzzling the soft skin of a remaining human hand on the Singularity creatures and this strikes a sort of note with the human bit that remained in the creatures. That attempt to illicit human love from the creatures by the dogs perhaps turned the creatures in their path from evolving more into machine, towards a lost path, tangled with foggy memory, of a human past.
Perhaps it was a little dog that first sparked the search my creatures find themselves on, as they hunt for a past that just lives in remaining synapses, firing the odd memory of humanity, but they cannot quite grasp it. (That might be another study I'll do for a painting. A play on Adam and God but with dog and machine.)
I have been trying to decide what sort of environment I wanted her to find and open her old computer full of the horrors of man. Here I am toying with the idea of a sort of run down mansion, maybe a hole in the ceiling. I have considered adding a tree growing up possibly through the roof. I am not sure. I might make another sketch where she is simply in a wood mostly dark but with a single beam of light.
I think the most wonderful aspect of being an artist is the joy of creation and the luck of telling a story to the viewer in pictures.
Many of my earliest memories are being little and looking at large rich old canvases in museums or pouring through old picture books containing allegorical works or paintings of the past. Whether it was hireoglypic pictures or wasp waisted figures dancing around the rims of funerary jars, the pictures spoke a story and told of other worlds. When before there is even the reading of written language, there is the story of the picture. That is Art to me.
I hope you enjoyed this version of my latest piece. It's final finished version will be in digital oil, only I have to decide where she and her friend are going to live before I do that.
If you like my work please upvote and feel free to resteem and by all means leave comments.
Check out my other posts:
- An orangutan or not, a Chair or not? "Ce n'est pas une chaise"
- My Dada drawing: woman with dog
- Animals in Chairs: French Bulldog
- My drawing for @atopy
My bitcoin wallet as per the @slothicorn request to provide it with your artwork.
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