John Duncan style reference and prompts

A decorative tempera like painting organized as stacked, interlocking bands of landscape and ornament. Flatten depth deliberately while still allowing a winding route through the image, using rounded earth forms, upright narrow silhouettes, and small precisely placed details to create a patterned rhythm. Outline shapes finely and fill them with muted teal, ocher, cream, and warm gold in gently textured, granular layers. Balance large dark pools or masses with pale accents that act as visual punctuation. Use even diffuse golden illumination, sparse hard shadows, and restrained value contrast so the entire frame reads as a unified tapestry. Let symbolic stillness and careful surface pattern carry the atmosphere; keep every edge and interval intentional.

A decorative tempera like painting presents an imagined garden of terraced water, rounded hills, tall cypress forms, and small figures. In the right foreground, an elderly bearded figure in a long dark teal robe and pale head covering stands on a circular stone platform beside a smaller richly dressed companion. One hand is raised in a quiet gesture toward a white bird perched just across a narrow band of water. In the lower left, two larger white long necked birds stand together on an island of brown rock, their pale shapes shining against a dark teal pool filled with tiny pale marks and muted reflections. Beyond them, curved ocher paths, layered green banks, and a winding channel carry the eye into a tapestry of ocher domes, arches, pale buildings, and upright dark blue green trees. The distance does not recede by natural perspective alone; it is flattened into stacked bands and patterned shapes, giving every part of the square image a deliberate place. Fine outlines hold forms together while granular paint and small ornamental marks soften the surfaces. Light appears as an even gold tinted glow across the scene, with little hard shadow and gentle contrast between cream birds, warm stone, and cool water. The whole painting feels ceremonial and dreamlike, its narrative figures embedded in a meticulously ordered landscape of color and pattern.