This piece was created during a period in my life when I gave up a stable home and instead spend several months on the road. My travels eventually brought me to spend a summer wandering around the Mediterranean, offering a much-needed time of solitude and self-reflection.
The presence of the goddess Artemis is a central figure in this work. In ancient Greek mythology, she was the guardian the wilderness, the hunt, nighttime and chastity. Here, she embodies the tension I felt while traveling through rural Italy and Spain during boar-hunting season. The distant sound of rifles and hunting dogs in the evening evoked in me both reverence for an ancient tradition and sorrow for the lives claimed. This duality reminded me of a harsh truth of nature: hunt or be hunted. In a sense, I felt pursued as well—not by strangers in the night, but by my own evolving self, pressing me to make space for the older, wiser person I was becoming.
Visually, the work blends elements of classical still life and landscape painting. By playing with scale and perspective, I aimed to create an environment both familiar and estranged, evoking a vague sense of disorientation within the viewer, echoing my own sense of being blissfully lost. The apples carry Edenic associations of temptation, knowledge, and—inevitably—a loss of innocence.
Essentially, this piece illustrates the contrasts between civilization and wilderness, innocence and wisdom, stability and growth. It is a record of a specific chapter of my life and an homage to the transformation that inevitably arises when one chooses to step beyond the confines of one's own known world.
