Robin Goodfellow - What Would Enkidu (Album Cover)

Robin Goodfellow approached me about doing the art for their EP, What Would Enkidu, in 2017. The thesis of the album is exploring our relationship with ourselves as beings capable of logic and reason yet tied inescapably to illogical or perhaps even harmful instincts.

After some back and forth, we settled on a visual representation of the 'Triune Brain', which is an inaccurate-but-useful model of the brain wherein we have within our brains a 'reptile brain', with a 'mammal brain' on top, and our higher-reasoning 'human brain' on top of that.

The 'lizard brain', or 'reptilian complex', roughly corresponds to the basal ganglia and is responsible for instinctual behaviors. The 'mammal brain', or 'paleomammalian complex' stands in for the limbic system and brings us our emotional and social behaviors. Then finally we have the human brain, or 'neomammalian complex' which is our higher-order thinking. It makes some intuitive sense, but as you can imagine the truth is much more complicated.

I find the theory does paint a picture that is quite real in a symbolic way though - a metaphor about the ongoing battle we all face balancing our logical and emotional selves and how to fit that self in the broader context of society.

The illustration style was inspired by ancient Babylonian tablets to tie in the album's references to the Epic of Gilgamesh. The original drafts were much flatter looking (and I will add them to this album if I can find one) and I will admit a bit nervously that I may have gotten carried away with detail at the expense of the symbolic image.

I painted the cover in Photoshop and the disc art in Illustrator. The disc art utilized just two images: A human and a reptile eye, and uses the same shape for the outside of one eye and the pupil of the other. I felt this was a nice symbolic echo of the theme, and makes for a sharp and clean disc.