Creation Myth 1927

In Wyndham Lewis’s *Creation Myth*, we see a world assembled with angular planes in greens, browns, and blues. Imagine him, mixing his gouache, and the brush moving across the paper, shifting between intention and accident. I imagine Lewis constructing this world piece by piece. He was a writer as well as a painter and you can sense him building a composition like a page or a stage, populated by characters and symbols. I see how he’s placed the figure down in the lower left corner, a simplified, linear form—a kind of Adam perhaps? Then my eye tracks the black and white figures above, bisected by a sharp diagonal, soaring like an allegorical bird… Or is it an angel of death? The work seems to recall the visual language of Cubism, but refracted through Lewis’s own sensibility, less about deconstruction and more about a kind of myth-making. Like many artists, Lewis is in conversation with art history, using its forms to tell a story of his own. Painting becomes a way of feeling, thinking, and building worlds of meaning.