Ruth
רות
Collage, January 2002
As soon as I became saturated with visual images of Ruth something began to percolate in me. There was an elaborate art calendar of the old city of Jerusalem in my files. Also an illumination from the 14th century Wenzel Bible pictured in Great Women of the Bible by Dorothée Söllee, which charmed me:
A wakeful, if troubled Boaz wrapped in his blanket on the threshing floor casts cautious looks toward his feet which share the other end of the same blanket with a tiny, beautiful young thing modestly draped and innocently asleep to the world. The forms and textures around them delicately suggested their future intimacy, bundles of erect sheaves and the dancing curlicues of a womanly fabric. I placed the dreaming forms inside a larger transparent dreaming silhouette as though they were gestating in the womb of history and collaged around them sections of the art calendar page that revealed the western wall, the tower of David, late antique mosaic sections of David and his harp, fragments of biblical passages, all of them pushing to the foreground a luxurious groundcover of red tulips.
In this manner, I “retold” the biblical story of Ruth and its genealogical thrust to present day Jerusalem and who knows to what mythic future.
