God Gets the R. Crumb Treatment
Drawing God is an age-old challenge, but ultra-quirky illustrator R. Crumb was up for it -- although it took a lot of white-out to do the job, which seems fitting somehow. Crumb tackled the first 50 chapters of the Old Testament in his latest creation, simply titled "The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb," and lo, it is good.
Drawing God is an age-old challenge, but ultra-quirky illustrator R. Crumb was up for it — although it took a lot of white-out to do the job, which seems fitting somehow. Crumb tackled the first 50 chapters of the Old Testament in his latest creation, simply titled “The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb,” and lo, it is good. –KA
Rock Solid JournalismUSA Today:
“Should God just be a bright light? Should I use word balloons? Should God be a woman?” Crumb says the answer came to him in a dream.
“I ended up with the old stereotypical Charlton Heston kind of God, long beard, very masculine. I used a lot of white-out, a lot of corrections when I tried to draw God.”
With a mixture of anticipation and anxiety, the art world has been awaiting Crumb’s long-rumored illuminated manuscript, a four-year, monastic-like effort to adapt every word of the first book of the Bible in distinctive pen and ink.
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During World War I, men on both sides defied their leaders and respective nations, if only for a moment. Let it be a lesson in 2019.
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