Creation Myth 1936

Wyndham Lewis made this 'Creation Myth' painting with oil on canvas, but we don’t know exactly when. The way Lewis builds up the colours and the shapes gives you a sense of artmaking as a process, where the end result is not predetermined. Look at how the forms seem to emerge out of a network of lines and planes. The paint looks as though it was applied wet into wet and the canvas is visibly textured. The colours in the centre of the painting, with the fiery reds, oranges, and greens draw the eye, but also dissolve into one another, creating an abstract sense of depth and movement. It reminds me of some of Picasso’s cubist experiments. But, unlike Picasso, there's a solidity and a sense of the monumental to the figures. They loom up out of the canvas like statues. It is a work that celebrates ambiguity over fixed meanings.