At first I was very confused, but not in a bad way, when I saw the painting. I came back to it every couple of days to focus on different areas of it. I kept discovering new things. The first thing I thought I saw was an eye with its lashes but then it transformed into this wild forest animal with its skin completely ripped off. I was a chef for many years and had the pleasure or displeasure of butchering a lot of different animals. What the image in the painting looked like to me, was the ripped off skin of a game animal ike a deer. There was the raw beauty of the natural scene and beneath it, something much more violent like the hunting of an animal in the forest. In Thorn of the Lily there are many forest elements: Thyme, and Juniper and resin but there is also tons of texture to recreate the experience of walking through the uncut texture of the forest.