This was my second poster. I drew it quite quickly after the first, on an A3 piece of paper. It wasn’t really intended to be blown up to full poster size but actually it looked rather good when it was. The idea behind it is kind of a reverse St George. Instead of using his lance to kill a dragon our hero is rather waking one up, releasing it from its egg among the roots of the Tree of Life. I had in mind Kundalini Yoga where the idea is to raise the serpent at the base of the spine and coax it up into consciousness – an enterprise that comes with lots of warnings and has left many casualties along the way. A bit like dropping acid really which I did quite enthusiastically for a couple of years in my student days before deciding to quit while I was ahead. The problem with acid was that the wonderful ideas rushed past too quickly to be captured on paper. Or even remembered coherently later.

The tree itself is the organic development of a hexagonal tile pattern I devised at the time. You can see the tile in the tree’s root and then repeated higher up, left and right, as seeds which will drop off and reproduce.