"A eukaryote?
The prince in a Persian
ultra-miniature."

What is paradise? The word “paradise” originated in ancient Persia and comes to us via the ancient Greek word paradeisos, indicating an enclosed park or garden.   “Paradise” also came to mean a place of supreme beauty or surpassing bliss, a Garden of Eden, heaven on Earth.

Every animal and plant cell on earth today is like a garden. These cells are eukaryotic cells, i.e. cells that have a nucleus.  Enclosed within its double-layered membranous wall are all its inhabitants: nucleus, Golgi apparatus, mitochondria, filaments, lysosomes, and other cell structures that organize the activities of the cell.

In my painting, birds, fish and lizard emerge from the cell, which lies in a green leafy ruffle surrounded by pleated space.  Made of disparate parts that, in the ordinary world, cannot exist in the same space, my eukaryotic cell is a chimera. And because of its beauty, this cell-garden is a metaphorical paradise, here to delight your eye after giving me great pleasure in painting it.