I spent a pleasant hour or two drawing a couple more figures onto the sketch for the Golden Bowl painting. I’m pretty happy that the painting will go the way I want it to; it’s a bit smaller and the relationships between the figures is compressed to extreme. Messing with “real” perspective seems to be the theme for these small pieces doesn’t it.Â
I’m not happy with the figure on the bottom right, who needs to move up and left a quarter inch. I also overcompensated for his poor positioning by making his legs too short. It’s a pretty easy fix but I’m disappointed that I drew the figure so poorly in the first place. Should have caught this.
The Golden Bowl is the most specifically alchemical painting I’ve done so far. I’m calling it the Golden Bowl because of the obvious compositional relationship to the Golden section. In alchemical (Pythagorean) philosophy  five is regarded as a particularly sacred number because the ratio of the lines of the pentagram is 1.62. Beautiful!
