The Word

In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was a sound welling from her heart, for only when her heart had spoken could all things begin in accordance with the way in which she intended. Her intention was necessary for the beginning of all things, and from this intention arose the creator.

Whether it is Nun who created the creator god Ra in the religion of dynastic Egypt, or [1]Tiamat, the primordial Ocean out of which formed the world and the other gods in Mesopotamian beliefs, the First Cause is female, the Creatrix. My painting interprets the Sound as Aleph, the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet. I could have used an aleph from a Hebrew font, but preferred instead to calligraph it on paper with a large chisel-sharpened carpenter’s pencil. Going this extra mile allows one to feel the form of things under one’s fingers, to participate, in some vicarious sense, in that original act of creation, which accords with my own intention to strive to make my paintings act as talismans: to embody some essence of the very things which they portray.

Something which English has tended to lose is the mystic association of words, of the actual forms of letters, with sounds. Hebrew and Sanskrit, with its ‘Ohm’ sound, retain that quality. In an attempt to revive some measure of this mysticism, the poet Arthur Rimbaud asigned specific [2]colours to the different nouns, deploying his words as if they were laid onto the paper from a painter's palette. Much of this original mysticism was lost when early Israelite beliefs abandoned this feminine First Cause, replacing it with a sole male creator deity, who in his hubris forgets that his creative powers originate with the Creatrix. 

Notes:

[1] In later Babylonian beliefs Tiamat took the form of a dragon, but originally her form was the more abstract Ocean.

[2] A = white, E = black, I = red, O = blue, U = green.