Rachel Stealing the Gods - Limited Edition 1 of 12 Print

The author of Genesis never tells us why Rachel stole her father's idols when she ran off with Jacob to Canaan to engender the tribes of Israel. Torah scholars have all kinds of theories. Mine, at the time I painted this image in 1997, was that Rachel wanted to preserve the images of the Goddess in the hope that She would survive Jacob's new upstart god Yahweh and reemerge someday to retake her rightful place as Earth Mother and Queen of Heaven. I thought of Rachel as the first feminist of the patriarchal age. Okay, my model's name was Rachel and she did have a thing for the Goddess. But my main inspiration for this image came from reading Joseph Campbell's books on mythology and "When God was a Woman" by Merlin Stone and other books, where I learned that the status of women in the middle east during the thousands of years of Goddess worship was much higher before Abraham came along. I did a series of drawings in which I saw the pole dancers at Circe's as holy women in the temple of the Goddess, the temple having been degraded to the titty bars of our own time. (More about this here: www.warrencriswell.com/553/ashera-intro.html) So this is an example of how an image can ambush me out of a page of text. I saw Rachel stealing the idols to secretly preserve the ancient heritage of the Goddess, while Laban reads about Yahweh creating Eve as an afterthought to serve Adam. Actually, I don't know what the hell he's reading, or how he got that gooseneck table lamp. Make up your own story. I made a large painting of this in 1997 and this print three years later. The painting had more stuff in it - Lilith, the expulsion from Eden, my dog Buffy - but the print focuses on Rachel and her father. It's a 2-color linocut, image 7 x 5 inches, sheet 10 x 8.5 inches. It can mail unmounted or matted with a white or off-white mat. The Criswell Linocut I began these experiments with linoleum back in 1999. Although these prints may resemble etchings, drypoints, lithographs or some strange hybrid, they are true relief prints, printed in two or more colors from linoleum blocks. I didn't invent this technique - Picasso and his printer Arnera did - but I've adapted it to my own purposes and, since nobody else in the world is doing it as far as I know, I'm calling it "The Criswell Linocut." The two most important things about this technique are that (1) I cut the designs with a drypoint needle and (2) that I print the dark color first and the light color second. This enables me to draw my image directly on the key block, just as I would draw with a pen on paper, rather than cut away everything BUT the image as in traditional relief printmaking. For more info about this, checkout www.warrencriswell.com/linocuts.html.

Printmaking:Linocuts on Paper

Artist Produced Limited Edition of:1

Size:8.5 W x 10 H x 0.1 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.