Exodus 7:3-4
…though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt,
Pharaoh will not listen to you.
Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and bring my hosts, my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment
In most of these descriptions I have tried to focus on the spiritual implications. What is the concept that I believe the passage is trying to teach me? Sometimes the painting itself is a result of my wrestling with my own interpretation, wondering if I am on the right track.
This time I’m going to describe how I came up with the design. I don’t usually even start a painting until I know what it will look like, and for this painting I remember exactly how the image came into my mind.
My goal was to create a painting for the Ten Plaques of Egypt in the book of Exodus. They are: blood, frogs, gnats or lice, flies, disease, boils, hail, locusts, darkness and the death of firstborn males.
The most difficult for me to imagine were the deaths of livestock from disease, and the death of all the firstborn males. I thought I could paint a dead animal but not the tenth plague, so my first decision was to represent only the first nine plagues in my image. The viewer can read the rest of the story if they are interested in how it ends, right?
Then I separated (in my mind, at least) the creatures from the others. When I realized that both hail and boils are round, and I could have hail in the sky and boils on the ground as a background pattern.
If the sky was dark that would take care of the ninth plague, too.
That led me to thinking about the snakes. In researching the plagues I kept seeing pictures of the Nile, which is shaped like a fan at the mouth. Well, the text said that Moses snake was eating the other snakes, and I got that same shape in my mind. The image of Moses snake would be the Nile, and the other snakes would form the river delta. I could paint around the snakes to represent the river turning to blood.
From there, I knew I had it!
The rest was just arranging the creatures…
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