Alchemist's Lab I

The fundamental idea behind this one is of a space in which various disparate ideas come together, and through their interaction create new and strange and compelling things. Max Ernst and Andre Bréton used Comte de Lautréamont's line "the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table" from Les Chants de Maldoror to describe the phenomenon the Surrealists were trying to achieve, to create powerful poetic imagery beyond the confines of the rational mind.

When I was in high school I read a pop-science article about scientists believing that dreams were the result of the brain offloading and getting rid of unnecessary memories and information, but that in the process these discarded thoughts collided with one another and produced dreams. I suspect this is nonsense, like most pop-science articles from the mid-2000's tend to be, however the idea remained highly compelling. Dreams were something that in my teenage years would produce such intense emotions that I would if I had a really interesting dream, I could coast on that feeling for the rest of the day. 

Even before I came across the ideas of the surrealists spelled out like in the quote above I was attempting to disparate things to collide with one another in the hopes that I could replicate the emotional power of those dreamstates. This also impacted a lot of my early storytelling, which was focused upon... sort of creating a string of logic between the absurd, and following that to interesting ideas and imagery. That "string of logic" and the ideas and imagery being more important than the absurd, the absurd being almost a byproduct.

In the case of this image, and with the detail heavy images like this which I enjoy making, part of it is having all of these different objects and stories going on in the background, that require a sort of reconciliation with one another, and an implication of something larger going on behind them. I think that is also why I'm drawn to the works of the Symbolists and Surrealists which have that same quality, meanwhile I really dislike "Visionary Art" and "Fantastic Realism" because despite having the bizarre imagery none of it interacts with one another, it doesn't move, it's like a watch with static gears.

This illustration was done at 17x22in. I went back and forth a little bit on the position of the wings on the peacock before settling on the original composition, so as a patreon exclusive I've included those other 2 iterations.

(EDIT 8/2/2022) - I found a couple of photos I took in the middle of the process, the first after the basic pencils were laid down, and the second after I had gotten well into the inks.