Mounds are half-plant, half-human creatures in the paintings and writings of artist Trenton Doyle Hancock

Trenton Doyle Hancock

Trenton Doyle Hancock is an American artist. He was born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and grew up in Paris, Texas.Hancock received a BFA from Texas A&M University, and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia...

 He explained in an art21 interview that the mounds were created thousands of years ago, when an ape man "masturbated into a field of flowers". Hancock's mounds resemble black and white striped hills, with tree-like skeletons and roughly human-like heads. Mounds represent good in the artist's own depiction of a spiritual struggle between good and evil

Evil

Evil is the violation of, or intent to violate, some moral code. Evil is usually seen as the dualistic opposite of good. Definitions of evil vary along with analysis of its root motive causes, however general actions commonly considered evil include: conscious and deliberate wrongdoing,...

 (evil being represented by vegans

Vegan (creature)

Artist Trenton Doyle Hancock uses the word vegan to refer to fictional creatures responsible for the death of The Legend, the oldest of a plant-like species known as mounds. The concept of a vegan is based largely on the more common usage of the word...

). In Hancock's art, the mounds are an ancient and primal species, with deep connections to nature

Nature

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...

, the oldest of which is known as The Legend.

Paintings of mounds, including The Legend, are currently featured in the exhibit "Moments in Mound History" at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Cleveland Museum of Art

The Cleveland Museum of Art is an art museum situated in the Wade Park District, in the University Circle neighborhood on Cleveland's east side. Internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian and Egyptian art, the museum houses a diverse permanent collection of more than 43,000...

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