Often I find that my painting is an iterative process. There's an idea, but translating it onto a canvas becomes constrainingly cerebral. With luck, I then switch over into a non-programmed, loose, sort of abex mode - only to subdue the original idea. This is what happened here. The idea of Genesis and Paradise was overtaken by the process of intuition. And looking back, it was a sort of paradise, fictional and imaginary but earthly, and I called it "shangri-la".

Shangri-La is a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton. In the book, "Shangri-La" is a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains. Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise but particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia—a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world. In the novel Lost Horizon, the people who live at Shangri-La are almost immortal, living years beyond the normal lifespan. The word also evokes the imagery of exoticism of the Orient. The story of Shangri-La is based on the concept of Shambhala, a mystical city in Tibetan Buddhist tradition. (Wikipedia)