Seven Days was a monumental project. The story itself being a several thousand years old with its Babylonian source deserved something special, something grand, and so, grand became big, and big ended up measuring 190 x 160 cm for each canvas, executed, as usual, in oil paints. With this, I had to remind myself that its not so much what is written into this story that matters, but what’s not written. This is a story veiled in cryptic shadows, designed to be an heuristic riddle, designed to stimulate, and certainly not designed to entertain. It comes to us from the ancient Sumerian/Mesopotamian world. It teaches us more through the questions it raises than the answers it provides. In our western tradition, this creation story comes via the Hebrew Torah. It is now found in every christian bible as Genesis One which includes 31 verses for a total of only, and approximately, 600 words in English (depending on translation) and the first three verses of Genesis Two which establishes the Sabbath, a Saturday, as the Seventh Day of the week, or the day the gods rested. Never has such a full story been written in so few words.
My intention with this series is to bring to light a playfulness, a richness that only image can provide. As is said, a picture is worth a thousand words.
I’ll follow with some notes and explanations on both my approach and the story itself, pieced together as best it can be from various sources.
And so it begins …
Day One –
It’s on this day that the gods created the Heavens and the Earth, but we must ask where this earth was created, because it was without form – on what stage were these gods playing? There’s a spirit moving on the face of some waters, but where did these waters arise, when were they created? All of this pre-exists the creation of the first thing on this first day, and that’s the light. This light is then seperated from the darkness, which also, apparently, pre-existed the light.
Day one was a Sunday.
Day Two –
On this day, we see the gods have built, or chosen a stage to work on, that stage being water. We see this water divided into “waters above” and “waters below” by something called the Heavens, and renamed Sky. That’s it for the day, a day of direction and dimension, for we now have above and below, and if so, we also have right and left, and forward and back. This reality is now pre-positional, and the movement implied is what will allow for life to occur, for life is movement.
Day two was a Monday.
Day Three –
Today the lower waters allow the lands to appear. Plants and trees spring up on the lands bearing fruits and seeds and . The waters above, you might ask – where are they and what do they do? Why are they there, these waters above the heavens, above the sky?
One thing we’ve got to consider here is what happens when water meets this new land. Waves will be created, and this will be important in the future, on the sixth day.
Day three was a Tuesday.
Day Four –
It was on Day One that we saw light brought onto the scene – but its on this day we see the creation of lights in the sky so that day and night could be recognized, somehow, by someone. Greater lights, lesser lights appear, the stars and the planets – all these things that actually define a cosmos, a universe. There is now a place, a home for life to expand and evolve.
Day four was a Wednesday.
Day Five –
The lower waters now contain life, all the fishes of the sea, the monsters of the deep (one called Leviathan) and the flying creatures of the sky. All life at this point is designed to multiply, to be fruitful and reproduce by command – this is imperative, and axiomatic – it was said, and it was written.
This fifth day was a Thursday.
Day Six –
On this day the land is addressed – all the living creatures who walk the land come to be. Big beasts, little beasts, cats and dogs. Man, of his particular type, was created – this man being Adam. Of course, his need to be fruitful and multiply would have to be addressed, so the god’s present Adam’s first wife on this day – the fiery, demanding Lilith. There would, apparently, be no mate for Leviathan, yet, no amphibians, and no reptiles in this particular story, though a walking, talking serpent would show up later hanging around a particular tree.
Yup – this, the sixth day, was a Friday.
Day Seven –
Its the end of a busy week, and the god’s need a break. Creation is a tiring job, even for those great creators, so on this day nothing is created. There will be no more, and no less, and all that’s left to be done is to stand back, admire one’s own work, and watch things unfold in thier own way. It’s a sacred moment, this rest, maybe more so than the act of creation itself, for this day has been blessed by those tired gods that simply want to take a break after a good job well done. This is life.
Finally, a day off.
This seventh day was a Saturday.
Notes: Painting the completely ineffable concepts found in this story, executing a near-impossible presentation of such abstract ideas in a visual manner, well, once this idea came to me, it was one whose time had come, and I couldn’t deny it. To paint such an abstract in a representational format was a needs be done situation. However, this was to be a huge undertaking for me- not only were there the challenges of representation, but there were the problems of presentation itself- how to accurately put what is ancient into a contemporary image. In all fairness, such a huge undertaking would need to be done on extra-large canvasses, so I chose a two meter plus size to begin, around a seven foot height.
In reading the story, we find that the earliest days are extremely abstract conceptually (the immediate introduction of gods, waters, light, etc), and the later days are progressively more concrete (the creation of birds and animals and such stuff), at least at a single glance. Its here, in the midst of the cryptic and familiar, that we find ourselves, and here, as a painter, I found myself. When addressing this Christian, Hebrew, Mesopotamian story of the Seven Days of Creation, problems arose in how to present such abstract concepts as things. We have “waters above” and “waters below, we have ”monsters” of the deep, and we even have the “gods” themselves (yes, in this story, god was actually a plural). I mean, even considering an artist’s right to licence (which I do take from time to time) how does one even paint a “god” or “gods?”
Then, well, there is the story itself to consider, and a certain level of importance that comes with it – this isn’t Three’s Company or Mr. Ed – this is 5,000 years of sacred, spiritual narrative. For me to entertain painting what is normally to be taken in sincere reverence, I had to go to the worldly, tongue-in-cheek side of the plate. I wanted this, and needed this, to be a really fun story, and so drew from the most fundamental precept of the story, the foundational key of the whole thing, and that was “thou shall be fruitful and multiply.”
This multiplying was not a request, it was a demand, a serious command. It was imperative for these gods to create a self-perpetuating system of reality that required no following maintenance. They didn’t just want the seventh day off, they wanted the freedom to go on and create more worlds elsewhere. This is what they did. Thinking anything beyond that is just conjecture in regards to this series. In this story, there were no other demands made on humans but the “fruitful” one, there were no trees not to eat from, there were no mistakes to be made or be punished for, there were no rules except that one. Rules would come later.
You must be fruitful and multiply. In this story, this demand is placed upon all “living” things. Trees and bushes, birds and fishes, and finally humans. The culmination of these gods’ plans was the creation of the first man and the first woman, the man’s first partner. This first story is not the story of the creation of Adam and Eve (it was Eve who would come later) but the story of the creation of Adam and Lilith, created as equals, from the same source, the same materials, and at the same time.
Once faced with the necessity of procreation, Adam was a pretty average guy. In other words, he was clumsy and insecure. Putting this in the hands of the inexperienced, we’ll see that it’s the woman, not the man, who is much more equipped at getting things done the right way. She is more equipped intuitively, practically, emotionally, and necessarily to sort such things as this out. In these matters, Adam reveals himself to be a simple boy, naive, and even a clumsy oaf. In short, Adam was an extremely insecure, easily threatened, beastly cro-magnon.
To detail, Lilith was an equal to Adam, and Adam’s initial excitement, his pupply-dog crush, soon turned difficult, if not disastrous. As written by a certain ben Sira (i.e. the Aleph-beth of ben Sira) Adam was pretty insistent about being on top. After a while, Lilith found this a bit monotonous and mundane and wanted her share, so went for the top herself. Adam didn’t like this. Long-term relationship struggles ensued without Adam compromising, so Lilith left. She was commanded to return but refused. She was later, historically, described as a demon, one of the night, continuing to obey gods’ demand that she create and give birth, evolving into a kind of wicked, baby-making whore to the devil. She even becomes a nightmarish monster who not only takes men for their nocturnal emissions in their sleep, but becomes a killer of babies who weren’t her own.
Back to the texts of the Tankakh/Bible , we see Adam recreated and alone amongst animals and the typically prolific life found in our visions of paradise. He parades in his loneliness through this garden under gods’ command to find a mate. In so doing this search, examining each of every species, he names them. They are Tiger, Bear and Horse. They are Duck, they are Rabbit and they are Mouse – all in a way of proclaiming a metaphysical dominance while asking the female of each pair if she is his mate – a paradox indeed, asking one who is obviously paried off already if they’d like to be with another instead. The image of Adam going from beast to beast asking “are you my mate, are you my mate?” would have one relaize the ultimate failure of such arrogant, childish behavior. Failing to find his special girl (one obviously so unlike his first and happily forgotten wife), Adam is put to sleep to serve in the creation of a new woman, one who is a secondary device, a kind of clone, from the existing matter of Adam’s body.
This woman was apparently intended to be not so independent, not so strong-willed, and certainly more obedient than the first of Adam’s mates (there is even mention in some obscure source that I cannot recall that there may have been six Eves created, progressively, one by one, each one failing in meeting Adam’s demands and needs, until the last, which is the Eve we know today, finally appears). This Eve is to be Adam’s long-term partner and mother of his children, though even she was found to be lacking and less than perfect in her disobedience towards the newer rules of living in the garden, including that one of NOT eating that tasty apple (or pomegranite or grape, depending again on source) from the Tree of Knowledge. In other words, a Stepford wife Eve was not. In fact, she was obviously quite discontented and unfulfilled or she would have never explored those bigger realities offered by that forbidden fruit, and she may not have even been all that much less independent and beautifully savage than Lilith.
And so, that’s it, in an over-sized nutshell and far from complete, but the best I can do without getting more pedantic, and without being a complete scholar on the subject.
