Preston Craig - Ode to Rousseau

Medium: Digital
Dimensions (height, width of artwork): 14x18 inches

This is a digital piece Preston Craig created in photoshop and illustrator as an Ode to Rousseau’s “The Dream”.  The background color of the piece is black. The top of the piece has a ½” camouflage green colored rectangle that extends from the right side of the painting to the left side It contains a row of black silhouettes of perching birds. The rectangle disappears behind a fan shaped arrangement of yellowish green, pointed leaf fronds that have eye shaped elements at the end of each frond. Emerging from underneath the fronds are 3 curvilinear bands that are green and marble patterned, going from a yellowish green to a deeper forest green. To the right side of the painting is a large 3” wide rectangle with a gradient darker green at the bottom of the rectangle to a light, orangey green at the top. This extends most of the height of the image. It is semi-translucent and within its borders there is a row of curvilinear circles that start out about a 1” diameter at the top and descend to about a ¼” diameter at the bottom of the rectangle. The rectangle is divided down the middle by a curvy shape similar to the female form. On the right side of the rectangle is a row of thorny projections that seem to pierce the softness of the rectangle. Towards the bottom of the image in the lower right side, is a fan-shaped band of translucent, pointed, green leaf fronds. Behind the fronds, is a golden-yellowish. camouflaged, silhouetted figure of a woman lying on her side. Her body transforms into the serpentine shape of a snake as it snakes along the bottom edge of the painting from right to left. Thorny barbs project out of the end of her tail as it crawls up a short distance on the left side of the painting. In the left center of the image is a large, spot-patterned, perched bird silhouette that is light green in color. Behind the lower portion of the bird, a large, human eye in shades of yellowish green, peaks out. Lastly, behind the bird shape on the left side of the image is a gradient green small rectangle that is approximately 2.5” in length and 1” in height.

I created the image digitally in a surreal kind of space with many elements of symbolism