Conversations with Eve Digital Painting.   In June 2003, I traveled to Florence and stood in the Church of the Carmine and looked up at the famous Masaccio fresco, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve. It is perhaps for me, one of the most memorable images to come out of the Renaissance, and having seen it in art books since my student days realized its enormous impact. It captures a movement or time that is universal, the relationship between the male and female, the metaphor of the Garden of Eden, a sanctuary.   The exhibition Conversations with Eve explores a personal journey of relationships and encounters with women. Back in the early nineties I used the Masaccio image in a drawing that conveyed the idea of expulsion, as I had to flee the South African Apartheid system in the mid 1980’s and found myself in exile from my homeland. In the drawing there is also the reference to the male and female and it has taken me a decade to understand the significance of the drawing. No longer able to find sanctuary in one’s homeland (Eden), it places greater emphasis on the significance on relationships as a means towards finding identity, sanctuary and the familiar, outside of Eden.   II   The notion of sanctuary has been in my work for some time, The Harbour Mandala series I completed in the mid 90’s investigated the use of the mandala and the metaphor of the harbour as places of sanctuary or safety. The processes of painting or conversations with paint are in themselves activities of the familiar, there are certain rituals that take place when you paint, it is a world that although risk taking allows one to take sanctuary.   This act or conversation with paint, is an idea I’ve used for some time. It is about action and reaction, it is through this process that the image is built, destroyed and rebuilt. It is a similar process for painting as for using computer imagery where the layers created in Photoshop are blended in a concentrated conversation of shapes, colours and aesthetic qualities.                                                           Recently, my work has turned to a series of meetings, contemplations and encounters with women. These digital works, essentially explore this process, and the realization that the spaces we create are attempts to find commonality and sanctuary…but even between the closest of human relationships there are infinite distances. We may involve and delight in the painted or digital world, but ultimately we must view it from a distance…and no matter how close we are, we must eventually part.                                                                                   It is the moments much like the experience of a haiku poem that we live, or in the playing of a simple piece of music that ultimately fades to memory, or the sand mandala that is swept away that these paintings and digital prints allude, they are representations of moments, feelings and experiences made visible…they offer an encounter with Eve, the first woman (with the exception of Lilith), from whom we are all born.                                                               David Trout 2004