April 23, 2010.  In my past work, particularly in the Psalms project, I Will Wake the Dawn (JPS 2007), I have attempted to express a wide variety of emotions.  However, I’ve never before dealt with warfare, which, thank heavens, is far from my own experience, but which is at the core of the core of the Deborah story.   Accomplished entirely in shades of crimson, this sharply angular painting attempts to capture the adrenaline-charged cut-and-thrust of the late Bronze Age battle described in Judges 4:12-21, the fragmentary crowd of impressions of aswords and axes, rearing horses and warriors, blood and flying arrows.  All those hours of sketching Mesopotamian friezes in the Met have come in useful!

This painting expresses the chaos of Deborah and Barak's battle in Judges 4, 12-21.