The Writing On The Wall
�The Writing on the Wall� was taken from a line drawing of Judith squatting at the top of a portico surrounded by attendants, the decapitated head of Holofernes extended over her head on a platter by one of the attendants, the headless corpse at her feet, dripping blood down the stairs. This had evolved from another Judith (standing this time, holding the severed head herself over the recumbent body dripping its blood into lotus blossoms in a pool), and this from another, and so on and so on, backwards and backwards - nothing comes from nothing! This was deliberate iconoclasm inspired by the Symbolists ( Felicien Rops especially, Gustav Moreau obliquely - in the use of jewelry as armor, and Woman-as-Castrator). She was lifted out of her sitting, away from her friends and headless victim, and isolated as an exercise in graphite technique, an exploration of the endless possibilities of black, white and grey tonalities, and patience and perseverance, as much as irreverence and lampoon and take-that-in-your-face. She is the sister of Herodias in �Enter Herodias�.
�The Guard of Honour� - since he, too, in his turn, was a graphite devolution from � - is her cousin. All of these were arrived at by a process of tracing upon tracing until the final correct version was achieved - the process I have always used . But in the present setting of the columns and stairs of the portico - pure, deliberate Maxfield Parrish (�Day break� etc.) - without the attendants, head and corpse, she had become something, someone else - a guest, a participant of the feast of the Writing On The Wall in the bible. So the unintelligible writing went up behind her, and there she was.
�But she is a self-portrait of you,� said William Gordon (to whom she is dedicated), after looking at her for about half an hour. �She is you sitting in your corner in your porcupine skin of jewelry that no one can get close to or touch.� And I thought she was just my take (blasphemous, to be sure!) on the over-jeweled fertility deities of the East! But really, on a more serious note, I think that this early series is really about agony and the protective devices and defenses we put up around it in order to survive. |
