Where is Joseph's Coat? No. 1 Painting

Composite ancient woodland scene made with digitally captured ancient woodlands, monoprint, imprints of pressed leaves, muddy riverbanks and animal tracks and trails and painted marks. The river runs through this landscape and a human dances in it. Inspired by Constable country; a construction of the natural world, in part like Constable’s composite technique, that looks back and into the future simultaneously. There is tension between the fragments from different sources and the landscape it tentatively resolves into. This quality is emphasised using holographic paint. Rabbis loved to interpret missing parts to a story and to fill in the gaps. The rabbis link the garment worn by Adam and Eve through Biblical generations and including to Noah to Nimrod, to Jacob and ultimately to Joseph. Through these stories, humans were part of the environment, and the coat can be seen as a mantle of responsibility that humans can put on. The garments were stunningly beautiful, and hand painted with animals and birds and engendered trust between Man and animals. The coat provides a metaphor for humanity’s relationship to our environment and to nature and yet also points to how that trust is so often betrayed. I pose the question – ‘Where is Joseph’s Coat now?’ Joseph was betrayed by his brothers and the coat was stained with goat’s blood, torn, and ruined to convince his doting father that Joseph had been torn apart by wild beasts. This sibling betrayal left the coat eclipsed for millennia. In my painting, the cloth of this coat re-emerges tantalisingly. It is degraded but still beautiful and hovering by Humanity as an option, a fragile provocation, a reminder and sign of hope. The new coat that I am envisaging is about mending, patching, re-constituting, and about permeability, where our destiny is inextricably linked with the survival of Nature and our interdependence. Co-existence or no existence.