This week’s ARTiculation is by our Internal Managing Editor, Devorah Friedman:
My high school has a comprehensive arts program, teaching skills from Hebrew and English calligraphy to watercolors and the underappreciated art of paper cutting. Senior year culminated in a project combining calligraphy with a paper-cut illustration of a Bible verse.
I chose the verse “Many thoughts are in man’s heart but the counsel of God — it will prevail” from Proverbs 19:21. A midrashic story attributes this verse to an attempt of King Solomon to circumvent a prophesied event and the fantastic results that resulted in the very outcome he attempted to avoid. To illustrate the story, I included a crowned head and a woman (representing Solomon’s daughter — one of the central figures in the story) flanking a nondescript person’s head. The figures are surrounded by a circuitous labyrinth, which was simultaneously meant to represent the nebulous workings of the mind and tangled neural networks.”
