Flight From Atlantis

 I fancied doing another dramatic Fantasy landscape so I thought that I would see what Midjourney came up with using word prompts like "volcano". Eventually it came up with something interesting but this one acted more like a trigger for a painting idea as opposed to an image that I could use in a painting as such as I hardly used much of the original Midjourney piece in the end. Once I had settled on a volcanic island the demise of Atlantis came to mind. As I looked at the Midjourney piece I viewed the dark island in the mid ground as Atlantis being destroyed by the pyroclastic flows from the volcano behind it. I thought it still needed something of interest in the foreground and had the idea of a boat escaping the destruction (a Trireme) so I ended up with a painting with a lot more narrative content than I was contemplating originally. I liked the wan sun at the top and used it to amplify the idea of the end of a civilisation by a sunlit landscape at right being blotted out by the volcanic cataclysm.

This is another small painting that I intend to show at IX in Reading PA next month.

Oil on fine cotton 16" x 12".

There is a short step-by-step progress through this painting in previous posts on this blog.

Midjourney