Fictional landscape

This is another one of my thick paintings. As the painting slowly developed, and this sort of wonder-scape started to crystallize, I found myself looking for signs of people somewhere in the image, but I couldn’t find them.

Why I should need people to be there was a question I never really confronted, anyway the scape by itself kept feeling ‘almost resolved’ but never quite. There arrived an agonizing period lasting months where I would turn the painting upside down, like its possibility better than its ‘true orientation’, and bang away at it for another week that way, only to revive its old orientation again after reconsidering its possibility in the wake of the new changes. What was once a rough sea at the bottom would become a turbulent sky at the top; I seem to be attracted to unintended images.Thus my fictional landscape oscillated back and forth between this and that, a truly insane rhythm with special appeal for the Libra, which may indicate the world’s inability to satisfy me (or us) deep down.
It occurred to me at a certain point that the painting felt quite oriental, even though it had become too complicated for that comparison to really hold. It got to the point where every time I turned it upside down, I liked it better than the way it was right side up. I think in the end the painting got mad at me -too much paint- and so I finally surrendered and signed off.

But a few months later, when I happened to be looking at it on its side, I thought I spied the double-image of Dante & Virgil, always seductive to me those two. I held my gaze tight on that spot for a spell -partly in order to coax them out, partly to be able to recall them in color later. This to let you know that the painting you are seeing here is a bit different, now it has in the lower right corner the image of Dante and Virgil, but everything else -the bright yellows especially- remain.