Neo Goddess

There was a competition in the lead-up to the release of a Sony Cambridge-developed PlayStation 2 game called Primal. The brief was to create an interpretation of females in a video game, and when I read about the competition, the deadline was Friday the same week! So I shot for the top, and came up with the concept of a warrior-goddess with the strength of the Greek huntress Artemis, but the feminine earthly-nurturing aspect of Gaia, a familiar concept of many Japanese RPG games. I also looked in the British Museum for inspiration, where I got the idea of having her surrounded by a blazing halo from an image of Shiva. This was the result of a near-24-hour-straight session of intense painting. (Incredibly, I won, and the painting was displayed in the Institute of Contemporary Art.)