Circular Tree of Knowledge image
I drew this image during the Christmas holidays:
The inspiration is of course The Tree of Knowledge from the Book of Genesis in the Bible. The roots are supposed to look a little like neurons. That didn’t work as well as I would like. But I’m quite happy with the leaves at branches at the top. The tree is actually made from two separate trees intertwined. One interpretation of the story of the snake and Eve, which occurs in the third part of Genesis, is that “the knowledge” is basically the emotions related to sex. There was much debate by ancient theologians as to wether Adam and Eve knew about or had sex before eating the fruit from the tree. St Augustine was especially obsessed with this theme, and thought that they probably did have sex before the fall, but that it would have been for procreation only, and without lust. Finding out about the joy of sex was a bad thing that made the Christian god angry, apparently.
I took the above photograph and cleaned it up. My normal process is to take a photograph of the artwork with a special rig I have set up for that — because I didn’t use that in this case (and I didn’t think of it) the end result isn’t entirely circular:
I then took it into Procreate to colour on the iPad. My initial instinct was to make the snake green so I avoided that. There are certain colours I consider a bit magical, and cyan or blue-green is one of those colours, so I made the snake cyan. You’ll notice the lower parts of the trees are a bit pinkish — the idea was that the plants have human spirit and the parts below ground are more like flesh and blood. The shape of the ground is a little like the top of a human brain. These elements didn’t work as well as I’d like, I’ll do this again one day, but better.
The two trees are slightly different colours. Only of the two trees has berries. They are meant to represent the two sexes, male and female.
I like the circular nature of the image and have ideas for other images like this.