Interloper, 2022

Based on a sketch from my Italian sketchbook. Drawing inspiration from medieval visions of supernatural entities which I examined at the Uffizi and Vatican Galleries.

Interloper transforms the natural world into a predatory dreamscape where even the trees seem infected with hunger and consciousness. The twisted branches stretch across the canvas like skeletal limbs or grasping nerves, their hidden mouths and watchful eyes suggesting an intelligence embedded deep within the landscape itself. Suspended among them is a strange pale creature — delicate, vulnerable, almost innocent — drifting unknowingly into the territory of something ancient and carnivorous. The painting evokes the feeling of stumbling into a place not meant for human understanding, a mythic borderland where nature no longer obeys familiar laws but reveals itself as animate, hostile, and spiritually awake. Beneath its surreal grotesquery lies an older folkloric fear: that forests, swamps, and lonely places possess secret appetites, and that mankind is not always the observer in the wilderness, but sometimes the trespasser being silently observed.

Reverse: A wandering castle in two colors.