Once I began to get more specific about my own personal ambitions things came into focus. I really want my kids to get a chance to visit the moon. It feels so possible somehow. Tying the Watchers desire to escape back to the stars to my own desire to have humanity do the same felt like an important touchstone to keep this painting personal.

In the fiction of Angelarium, Samyaza shows up and just starts being the boss. No threats. Just a commanding stature and an air of wisdom. A lot about holding power is just nailing the right tone. I figure that holds true as much today as it did at the dawn of mankind.

When the Watchers were a chorus, they had no names. They were formless and as one. Each Angel whispered together amidst the song of the cosmos. They sang of nothing and everything. No will or thought, only light. A boundless existence.

As they sang, a single mote of something, of nothing, passed through the Angel’s light and cast a speck of a shadow down upon the earth. Beneath the stars, that shadow looked back at the heavens and saw himself for the first time. In that moment he took a name. Samyaza.

One by one, Samyaza called out for his brethren and they bowed to meet him. He was the giver of names. Lord and king. There were none before him and none after.

The fair and childlike Kokabiel saw things in the stars that his brother Watchers did not. To him, he saw unknowable mysteries unfolding in the night sky. Men came to him, with hopes of divining some earthly meaning behind the movement of the heavenly bodies. Though he spoke with them often, it was difficult to take real information from his readings. The places and things that he described were in vivid detail, but failed to resemble the world in which they lived. At first, the obtuse quality of Kokabiel’s information was seen as a form of higher wisdom, beyond the reach of men’s minds. As time went on, many thought him mad.

Kokabiel longed to return to be among the stars again, forgoing all worldly concerns. As tragedy mounted around him, he did not see it, blinded by the glare of celestial light.