Jacob’s Ladder

William Blake’s use of ink and watercolour in this painting from 1800 creates a dream-like effect, as the watery materials evoke the fluidity of Jacob’s sleeping vision. We are presented with a tonal gradient: colour-contrast decreases, along with detail, as we look from bottom to top. In the lower half of the watercolour, the star-filled sky is dark but as our eyes ascend upwards, light fills the space, illuminating an awe-inspiring scene of wonder.

Jacob lies at the bottom in an awkward sleeping pose; indeed, one can imagine that getting comfortable would have been difficult in the wilderness with nothing but a stone for a pillow. Nonetheless Jacob is rendered in a deep and peaceful state of slumber. The vision of the spiral staircase appears from behind him, growing out of the stone on which he lays his head. Blake signals a spiritual encounter by his positioning of Jacob’s right foot, which protrudes into the dark, starry space beyond the edge of the earth on which he is lying. The composition leaves the viewer asking, where does the finite end and infinity begin?

The progressive recession of the spiral staircase suggests a vast distance. It seems that the stairs curl away into the sun and beyond to eternity. The lack of any structural integrity to the staircase asserts its unreality, allowing the spiral shape simply to evoke the power and energy of God’s promise (Cook 1914: 407).

The looseness of the drawing’s pencil lines emphasizes the immediacy of the work. The angels (some with and some without wings) descend and ascend the stairway, wafting and curving their bodies in ways that mirror the curling stairs. The ethereal quality of Blake’s painting means that just as this vision appeared out of nowhere, we can easily imagine it disappearing again, leaving us, along with Jacob, dumbfounded, ready to proclaim the ground that he is sleeping on as a sacred space: ‘How awesome is this place!’ (Genesis 28:17).

References

Cook, Theodore Andrea. 1914. The Curves of Life (London: Constable and Company)

Lister, Raymond. 1988. The Paintings of William Blake. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Wingfield Digby, George. 1957. Symbol and Image in William Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press)

This eleven-metre-high, eight-panel painting of a spiral staircase exemplifies how my artistic practice works with cropped and manipulated images of architectural interiors to explore ideas of longing in society.

Harnessing the enigmatic quality of paint, I confront the viewer with a towering staircase that exudes its own visual rhythm as it curls upon itself. Observed up close, the panels reveal an intuitive process where expressive brush marks of thinly applied paint suggest immediacy and exuberance. The sides of the panels reveal vertical drips, signalling a horizontally executed process, and the back exposes a scaffold support, shifting the painting towards sculpture.

The scale of the work, and its site-specific engagement with church surroundings, contextualizes it with the biblical story of Jacob’s ladder, despite there being no depiction of Jacob asleep at the foot of the stair or any rendering of angels ascending and descending.

The source material for this painting was the studio of French artist Gustav Moreau (1826–98). His symbolist paintings of biblical and mythological figures are hard to decipher in Descent, yet my reproductions of them line the walls around the painted staircase, mirroring Jacob’s dreamlike vision. A doubling is played out in the multiple curls of the stairs, recalling the baroque fascination of ‘tending toward infinity’ (Wolfflin 1986: 71). The painting tapers to a narrow top, where we glimpse an opening above. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) speaks of the world of human experience in terms of interconnected levels, or as Anthony Vidler describes it: ‘two stories, the one material, the other spiritual, joined by a stair of infinite folds’ (2001: 233). From one perspective, the painting reaches up to touch the untouchable; stretching from earth to heaven.

Concurrently, however, Descent questions whether the central image of Genesis 28:10–22 is best conceived as a ‘stairway to heaven’. The ‘ladder’ is let down into Jacob’s physical and moral wilderness. Rather than depending on the shaky foundations of Jacob's past actions and current circumstances, affirmation and encouragement are anchored in ‘the Lord [who] stood above it’ (Genesis 28:13).

This is a stairway from Heaven.

References

Harbison, Robert. 2000. Reflections on Baroque (London: Reaktion Books)

Koestlé-Cate, Jonathan. 2015. ‘Baroque Folds’, Art and Christianity, 82: 2–5

Vidler, Anthony. 2001. Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

Modern British artist Augustus Lunn’s (1905–86) surrealist visual interpretation of Genesis 28 hovers between poise and fluctuation. It was painted in 1944, towards the end of the Second World War. Sleeping outdoors would have been common practice for soldiers during the war, a necessity that unites the figure of Jacob with Lunn’s contemporaries.

Painted in egg-tempera, this arch-shaped panel in matt hues of blue, pink, and gold depicts a bearded Jacob, asleep in an angular rocky landscape. Growing out of Jacob’s feet, in the centre of the image, is a solid, perspectivally-rendered, spiral staircase with angels moving up and down it. At the top, a geometrically-abstracted, tonally-light transcendent world emerges with overlapping shapes, shadows, doors, and portals.

Jacob sleeps soundly, wrapped in a cocoon-like sheet with swirling folds in a deliberately archaizing, Byzantine style. The cocoon form repeats, with angels grouped in clusters underscoring the surreal nature of the dream.

Lunn’s precise execution, with its elements of naturalistic solidity, grounds the vision in an unnerving way. The layering of the colours, particularly effective in the top section, allowed Lunn to ‘reconstruct’ Jacob’s dream by combining biblical interpretation with surrealist forms (Taylor 2014: 109). The surrealism and the naturalism together offer a vertiginously stable depiction of God's promise.

To the left of the stair’s central axis, the sky begins to curl into a piece of paper, suggesting the notion that God the creator is himself an artist painting a picture. The use of repeated triangle shapes throughout suggests the Trinity, prompting the viewer to consider the staircase’s meaning. Does this Spirit-empowered, God-given vision point to the Son, just as Jesus’s words about himself in John’s Gospel quote Genesis 28? In John, the angels are also described as 'ascending and descending’, yet this time they do so ‘upon the Son of man’ (John 1:51). The staircase takes on a new, and prophetic, meaning.

References

Taylor, Lyrica. 2014. Still Small Voice: British Biblical Art in a Secular Age (1850–2014) The Wilson—Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum 17 January–3 May 2015 (Pinatubo Press)