January 24 - March 7, 2008 in the Board Room
I Will Wake the Dawn: Illuminated Psalms by Debra Band
 

Artist’s Statement

I Will Wake the Dawn Illuminated Psalms These paintings offer Hebrew and English illuminations of an anthology of 36 psalms, which were published in August 2007 by the Jewish Publication Society along with their accompanying commentary. This work follows my illuminated manuscript and commentary, The Song of Songs: the Honeybee in the Garden (JPS 2005), and I am presently engaged in illuminating other works of Hebrew poetry and other biblical texts and reside in the Washington, D.C. area. More information about my work may be found at www.DebraBand.com.

The 82 illuminated paintings included in this exhibit are painted on kosher calfskin vellum, sheepskin, goatskin and paper. The paintings use gouache (opaque watercolor), 24KT gold leaf and powdered gold, and the work includes one papercut (Psalm 24).

Why illuminate Psalms now? Over the nearly two millennia since the destruction of the Temple for whose rituals they were composed, these poems have become the essential root of both private and congregational prayer in both the Jewish and Christian communities. Religious or not, every member of Judeo-Christian society shares a familiarity with this ancient Temple liturgy. Yet it is this very familiarity that dulls our sensitivity to their exhilaration and pain, that leads us too often to read them by rote, rather than look at them with fresh eyes, to relate them to our own lives, joys and challenges. In these paintings, I attempt to interpret the psalms both through the eyes of Jewish tradition, and those of one living through the wonders and difficulties of life in our own day.

The 36 psalms illuminated here represent the spectrum of emotional and spiritual expressions embodied in The Book of Psalms that has inspired and comforted Jews and Christians since the days of the Temple in Jerusalem. I selected psalms of personal and communal joy, rejoicing and gratitude, prayers for healing and redemption in times of desperation, and of course, the love of and longing for Jerusalem. Included here are psalms important in Jewish private and synagogue ritual and prayer, including the entire Hallel cycle, several Psalms of the Day, psalms included in mourning rites, the introductory psalms for the Grace after Meals, and finally, a number of psalms from which Jewish tradition derives popular folk songs sung at weddings and other life-cycle celebrations. The title itself is drawn from Psalm 57:9. The wall-cards accompanying the illuminations present abstracts of the full commentaries offered in the book, I Will Wake the Dawn: Illuminated Psalms, as well as information on each psalm’s role in Jewish tradition and Christian liturgies. The book also provides literary analyses of each of the 36 psalms by the renowned scholar of Hebrew literature, Arnold Band.

The imagery with which I craft my visual interpretations of the biblical poetry draws upon many sources. The scene in each set of illuminations makes narrative sense, yet, following the lead of the medieval northern European masters, each object within that scene has a deeper symbolic value that enriches the meaning of the overall composition. These symbolic images derive from diverse sources: from midrash, from other biblical texts whose meaning relates to the Psalm at hand, and, in many cases from modern society and science, from striking landscapes and many other sources. While the overall painting usually creates a coherent, easily understood physical reality, parsing the symbolism of individual items within it reveals a more complex structure of ideas. I hope that the play of color, light, images and words within these pages provoke a contemplative conversation between you the viewer, the Psalmist, and the Divine.

Debra Band

Curator’s Statement

The psalms are so much a part of Christian worship and devotional life that it can be easy to forget that they were written for and by Jews. The 86 paintings that comprise I will Wake the Dawn are a visual reminder of their Jewish origin, pairing Hebrew texts with their English translations and setting them within a rich visual vocabulary that draws on Jewish ritual and memory, contemporary scholarship, and current scientific ideas. To enter the Board Room, with its walls filled with these paintings, is to enter a world of imagination and devotion in which the ancient arts of calligraphy and illumination glitter with immediacy.

Debra Band’s graceful renditions of the texts treat both languages with sensitivity, bringing out their visual beauty while keeping them legible. Likewise, the images on the pair of pages for each psalm echo one another while retaining a distinct individuality. This gracious duality extends to her explanatory wall cards, in which she notes not only her sources of inspiration and the place of each psalm in Jewish worship, but also the ways that the Christian tradition has incorporated various psalms into its liturgies. 

Although both Christians and Jews are known as People of the Book, both traditions know that the Word of God is much more than simply words. Debra Band is one in a long line of artists who have used their skill and imagination to make letters drawn on vellum, with ink, paint and gold, reflect the glory of God. In these Illuminated Psalms, she invites the viewer to explore her vision of our shared traditions, in which the words on the page and the images that accompany them begin to dance with joy.

Deborah Sokolove
Curator, Dadian Gallery