“Tree of Knowledge: Snowy Death”
filed in Book Artwork and Illustrations, Creativity on Nov.21, 2010
This is a sort of spin off from my book cover project for Dale Allan’s novel Me Not Not Into Temptation. Initially I did a sketch of the priest with his back to the viewer and one with his front — the latter being the one chosen for the cover since it was easy to see he was a priest.
After finishing Allan’s cover, I decided to do something with the back-to-the-viewer picture and so developed it into a different picture, this time as a hit man rather than a priest, and sans much of the symbolism. (Well, except for the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the background).
I’ve titled this one “Tree of Knowledge: Snowy Death.” (Based on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil mentioned in Genesis 2:9 as growing inside the Garden of Eden. Also, the idea that winter is the season symbolic of death.)
No. There’s no buyer as of yet for this illustration. And don’t ask why someone would do this as a “fun” project. Perhaps it is better not to go there.
That said, I have always been fascinated / terrified by the notion that there’s such a thin line between morality and immorality within each of us, and also with the human tendency to lash out with anger at the least provocation. (I am told) anger is a sort of mini-murder directed toward the object of our anger. Each of us has a little murder in our heart.
As Sigmund Freud noted, ‘The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.”
Perhaps there’s also a hit man in each of us, wanting to get out, just as it did in Nazi Germany, Mao China, or Stalinist Russia. The terrible truth of these times and places is that the people doing these evil deads weren’t inhuman monsters, but rather regular Joes. The guy living down the street from you. And maybe the guy who looks back at you from the mirror. Ordinary people seem very able to became extraordinary killers of the innocent when given the chance.
Anyway, here’s one of my nightmares: The cold, calm murderer who makes a living slaying the innocent and guilty alike, efficiently doing his work without apparent qualm. The murderer who, had things just a little different, might have turned out to be me.
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When not looking over his shoulder to see if an angry editor has dispatched a hit man for him, Duncan Long draws and paints illustrations for HarperCollins, Ballistic Publishing, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, Solomon Press, ILEX, Fort Ross, ISFiC Press, and many other publishers and self-publishing authors. See his book illustrations at: http://DuncanLong.com/art.html
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November 23rd, 2010 on 7:04 am
If you have had two or three close shaves with death in your life, you tend to think of mortality differently. I like to see this picture of yours as a depiction of a death wish: a desperate man in the winter of his life, who has risked too much and lost, wishing someone would just snipe him where he knelt. So the man in the coat is just a figment.
I’m using this box to thank you very heartily for the lovely write-up in your latest blog. Thank you!