Even The Soul

My best work, full stop. Number one — the only one that ever won something, the most accomplished in every sense. Most astonishing of all: it was made with Imagine alone, without any kind of retouching! The original sketch doesn't do it justice, but the idea is well represented. The strange title comes from the opening of a poem in English I was writing at the time — “Even the Soul, sometimes, can find...” — a poem that, of course, I never finished. The meaning of the work: the road — the usual metaphor for Life — can be long, dark, frightening and dangerous, but we must not give up and surrender to the first “easy” shelter we find (the open door with the light inside), because only by persevering, with dedication and commitment, accepting no compromises or easy help, do we reach the end of the road with our head held high.

A technical note: the peculiarity of this work is that it took two separate renderings, because my Amiga 4000 couldn't keep up. The first rendering reaches the low wall near the tree; the second goes from the wall onward. To join them I had to keep the lights of the two scenes fixed, so when I rendered the far part the lamp posts — though physically absent — were still there as light sources. I think this is the trick that made the rendering feel so realistic.