The Temptation of Eve

Eve and the Serpent 28 x 24 inches, tempera on shade cloth on hardboard, 1994

Garden of Eden 1 23 x 28 gouache on hardboard, 1995

Garden of Eden 2 (sepia) 16 x 24 inches, monochromatic gouache on hardboard, 1995

Eve and the Serpent 2 18 x 24 inches, acrylic on museum board on panel, 2009

The Temptation of Eve 18 x 24, acrylic on illustration board on panel, 2014

Eve, the serpent, and the apple is the first and one of the best stories in the Bible.  I have been inspired by it many times and have interpreted it variously.  My most recent painting The Temptation of Eve departs from the traditional imagery.  I have transformed the tempting snake into a reptilian humanoid.  This gives the story more credibility and makes it possibly something more than a fairy tale.  The snake is intelligent, clever even, and it talks to Eve, apparently man-to-man.  This means that the snake is not really a snake as we know it, but a reptile with human-like qualities.  There are many ancient myths concerning reptilian beings, many of them approaching human form.  They are always intelligent, sometimes bringers of wisdom and enlightenment, sometimes more sinister, even inimical to man.  Moreover, intriguingly, there have been many recent sightings of humanoid extraterrestrials who manifest a decidedly reptilian appearance.  So perhaps the reptilian depicted here has a resemblance to something real.  If the story in Genesis is a memory of a genetic experiment and Jehovah was an extraterrestrial human, a scientist rather than a god, who created modern man (in his own image and genetically compatible with himself), then the snake, the reptilian might have been a member of a different race of extraterrestrials.  And I guess the reptilian royally messed up Jehovah's experiment!

You can see more of work at www.artmajeur.com/stephander

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