Eden: Where the Past Feeds the Future

Eden, Mixed media eco print painting, 116X121

Eden brought me to tears in its making—not from sadness, but from that rare recognition when an image captures something you've always felt but never quite seen.

It began, as all my eco-print paintings do, with an act of collaboration between my hands and the dying bodies of plants.

The Alchemy of Eco-Printing

For those new to this process: eco-printing is a form of botanical alchemy where leaves, flowers, and twigs are bundled tightly against fabric or paper, then steamed or boiled. The tannins, pigments, and life force of the plants transfer their ghostly impressions—their final portraits—onto the surface. What you see in Eden is not paint mimicking nature, but nature painting itself through the medium of its own decomposition.

There's something profound in this. The flowers that bloom across the canvas gave their last breath to create this image of life's continuity. The medium is the message.

Two Figures, One Root

In Eden, you'll find two figures, both human, both essential, both rooted in the same earth by intertwining tree trunks.

On the right stands a male figure, his back turned to us, facing what has been and what is leaving. His spine glows with unexpected vitality—flowers, twigs, leaves emerging from his very bones—yet his form recedes into cool blues, the colour of distance and memory. He represents what I've come to call entropy: the necessary breaking down, the composting of the old, the release that makes space for new life. His turned back is not rejection but sacrifice, the letting go that feeds what comes next.

On the left rests a female figure who sleeps yet surges with potential. Her body curves in a dynamic pose—one arm raised, hair flowing like wheat in wind, her form painted in golden, earthy tones that seem to gather light. Her breasts are full as though with milk, her hips fertile and abundant. Golden flowers and leaves burst with life across her skin. She embodies what I call syntropy: the gathering force, the pull toward form and fruition, the dreaming that organises chaos into creation.

The Philosophy Beneath

I've been thinking deeply about entropy and syntropy—not just as scientific concepts, but as the twin engines of existence.

Entropy is often described as disorder, the tendency of things to break down and decay. But what if we understood it differently? What if entropy is our attachment to the past, the accumulated weight of what has been, the dissolution that returns all complexity back to elemental simplicity?

Syntropy, then, becomes our attachment to the future—the organising principle that builds, gathers, and creates. Where entropy breaks down, syntropy builds up. Where one releases, the other holds.

But here's the crucial insight, the one that demanded this painting into being: neither can exist without the other.

Without entropy, there is no raw material for creation, no space cleared, no humility learned from impermanence. Without syntropy, there is only decay without renewal, loss without meaning. They are not enemies but lovers, not opposites but complementary phases of the same breath—exhale and inhale, death and birth, forgetting and remembering.

Why Eden?

The title came to me suddenly, and once spoken, felt inevitable.

Eden is not just paradise. It's the place where choice enters the world, where the tree of knowledge splits time into past and future, where consciousness awakens to both memory and possibility. It's the original duality from which all creation flows—and yet, as my painting shows, it remains one garden, one root system, one living process.

Paradise is not static perfection. Paradise is the dynamic balance between what releases and what gathers, between the blue figure facing backward and the golden figure dreaming forward. Both are necessary. Both are sacred. Both are rooted in the same earth.

The Invitation

When you look at Eden, I invite you to see yourself in both figures. We are all constantly negotiating this balance—between holding on and letting go, between what we've been and what we're becoming, between the composting of old dreams and the germination of new ones.

The shared root system beneath both figures whispers the secret: these aren't separate forces battling for dominance. They're twin aspects of the same creative vitality, the same sacred process of becoming.

All of life, all of our creation, emerges from this careful balance. Not from choosing one over the other, but from honouring both—the backward glance and the forward dream, the blue spine and the golden body, the exhale and the inhale.

This is Eden. This is the garden we tend. This is the tree that remembers both.

P.S. — If you'd like to see more detailed images of Eden or learn about acquiring this rare painting, please direct your inquiry to lolita.romanoff@mystikriver.com. Your support makes this work possible.