Creation Myth 1927

Wyndham Lewis, sometime in the middle of the last century, made this painting, Creation Myth, with ink and watercolor. Look at the way he’s built the space like a puzzle, with flat, interlocking shapes. The color palette is muted, lots of earthy browns and blues, but then he throws in these pops of brighter colors, like that single red shape floating near the top. I love the texture in this piece. In the upper right, the cross-hatched mark-making contrasts with the fluid washes of color elsewhere. Then there is a figure, bisected by this field of marks, who seems to be giving birth. It's like he's showing us the world being born, bit by bit, out of chaos and order. Lewis was a founding member of the Vorticists, a movement that shared some connections with the Italian Futurists, so maybe we could think of the fractured planes in this work as an attempt to capture movement through time? Art is always a conversation, isn't it?