I painted Allegory of the Creation as a Workshop early in my career when I was abandoning the abstraction and surrealism of my previous painting, making a study of Dutch Baroque oil painting techniques and using a limited palette of earth colors. Thinking about how subject matter could be reintroduced to my work, I painted a series of allegories from imagination. I had been in Rome and studied Anthony Blunt’s book on Poussin, which showed that Poussin demonstrated philosophical ideas about the order of nature and the world in his landscapes.
This is an allegory addressing evolution. The creation is envisioned as a workshop—not a workshop in a building, but a workshop out in nature. Tools, some familiar, some invented, are laid on a workbench and some are strewn on the ground. Some have morphed into biological forms. There is a divine order and a natural order. The forms of tools, tooth, chisel, claw, knife, saw, imply a purpose, a use, and user. The tree in the background symbolizes the control of organic growth by a system of pulleys and counterweights—natural forces. Evolution is about how things came to be by transitioning from one form to another—whether by material or divine processes.