The Book of Job Series
The ambiguous shadows of experience.
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Here is a commentary I wrote for Ideas magazine (Vol. 8, Number 1, 2001), published by The National Humanities Center:
In New York, at the High School of Music and Art, as it was then called, I wrote a poem titled “The Song of the Book of Job”. That poem took as its subject a story I felt was so mysterious, ironic, and spiritually rich that it spilled over with meanings and contradictions. The story of Job asked, in the most modern of voices, how could such unfairness, cruelty, and evil exist in what Spinoza would call a God-filled world?
Thirty years later, over a period of eighteen months, I completed a series of paintings on the subject, “Variations on the Book of Job”. The series contains twenty-three paintings, all done in mixed media on canvas, all human in scale (four feet by three feet, for the most part).
The images are meant, in their swirling, leaflike, organic, shadowy disjunctions, to be arabesques drifting on a lumoinous ground, a chaos of shadows seeking form. Metaphorically, they express my feelings about the Book of Job itself and the confounding questions it embraces: the light and dark of the human spirit.
