Troya Ardiendo a sus espaldas

This was a theme i found in a book practicing spanish.
A sus espaldas means behind your back.
Troya ardiendo is Troy burning, after the last attack of the Greeks. The village was destroyed and Aeneas has burning Tory behind his back. This literal meaning has taken a wider meaning for the Spanisch writer Perez-, who uses this sentence in at least two of his books. The main character indicates with this sentence that everyone has his illusions, hopes dreams which have collapsed. The dreams are still there, but in ruins.

The motive of the theme was that i have drawn Troy burning behind the back of an elephant from the last theme.

The real start of my drawings was first to take a look if the theme was possible.


Very fast the 9-11 drama of New York comes in mind, when drawing skyskrapers as a symbol for the city.
In between i made a transformation of a crane on a postcard sent from Shanghai by a friend:
I liked the suggested existence of the city, by the crane.

The human "back" idea in the theme is also nice to explore.


Eventually i made a drawing about a sort of armored back. I continued making another version with a shadow and a smoking dump at a certain distance.
The next day this smoking dump took on the form of the armored back, in a sort of repetition.

Then i discovered through drawing that the meaning of the sentence can be enlarged again: the ruined illusions are not behind my back, no, i myself, my very nature is formed by these shipwrecked hopes.

This makes the theme turn around, there is no distance left between me and my desillusions.