Ecological Theme 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. Ambiguous Image 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. Stacked Animals 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. Oil on wood panel (85 x 120 cm) Artist: Corné Akkers