Where the Children of God Lay Sleeping Print

This work, whose title is derived from the last word's of Flannery O'Connor's novel 'The Violent Bear It Away', is my attempt to show a dream-like forest landscape, where vibrant floral life intertwines with death and night. I was painting it in the darkest months of the year, throughout the autumn-winter of 2020-2021 - confined to home due to Latvian lockdown and increasingly bad weather. Here you can see how I perceived the environment around me at the time: a space of mystery, anxious discoveries and unclear visions. After four years in London, I was mesmerised by the visions of vast woods that uncovered before me. Tall pines, moss and mushrooms, the grass hiding snakes and insects, rotten trunks on deserted trails — I was seeing it with the eyes of an outsider, a freshly disembarked young man returning to his now alien home. Beneath the eldritch spirit, the woods hide their sacramental, religious beauty. Children of God lie sleeping in cities, in the comfort of their homes, shielded from cold nights by walls and roofs, while nature is reclaiming the space around the houses, quietly calling men to merge with itself. The painting creates an almost psychedelic visuality of the scene: everything shimmers, glows, every creature casts a deep shadow that becomes a being of its own. Despite this, the work is highly observational, born out of daily studies of the woods near my house. It is not rare to find a bone or skull there if one know’s where to look. The night is a quiet time, and the painting urges those looking at it to remain quiet as well as if you really got lost in the woods and stumbled upon this almost sacramental mise-en-scene. Or was it a feverish dream?