Hermitage of the Sloth by Gregory Dalton (Original Drawing)

Above and beyond, the Araucaria trees stand with ancient austerity. Their geometry is archaic, almost pre human; vertical, disciplined, enduring. This drawing imagines a landscape in which deep time, extinction, and botanical life coexist outside ordinary chronology. Prehistoric animals, skeletal remains, tropical vegetation, and strange flowering plants occupy the same terrain, while a dark cave like opening suggests passage into another ecological or geological world. Rather than reconstructing a specific prehistoric environment, the work treats natural history as a dream; fragments of different eras accumulating into an invented landscape.
Dense passages of ink alternate with large areas of open space, allowing forms to emerge, disappear, and transform across the composition. The landscape becomes both an imagined ecosystem and a meditation on extinction, decomposition, memory, and the persistence of life through deep time.