Blueprint for Böhme

Artist/Creator: Russell FitzGerald (Artist)
Date: 1975
ID #: BG3207

Physical Description

Medium: ink
Support: paper
Dimensions: 59.5 cm 60 cm (Object)
Object Description: This was FitzGerald’s last major project before he passed away in Vancouver in 1978 at the age of 45. Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) was a German philosopher and Christian mystic whose thought inspired this experiment in mechanical reproduction and the “coincidence of contraries.” Meticulously drawn in summer 1972 on sixteen panels, it is meant to be viewed in the round, with Black and white bodies intertwining in a cosmic roundelay amid banners with excerpts of Böhme’s writing, including FitzGerald’s favourite: “In fire there is death: the eternal nothing dies in the fire; & from the dying comes the holy life. Not that there is a dying; but that life as love arises in this way from the painfulness.” The figures appear to be swirling around a globe or black hole. The artist wrote in his journal that he was not going for “the struggle of the opposites (which continually turn into each other) but the endless returning of God’s Being to Himself.” The drawing was made into a Mylar blueprint of the same size – where positive and negative space are reversed – that he intended to use to duplicate and disseminate the design. It is a summation of his life-long interest in duality; here the play of light and dark becomes the very form of the work.
-Jon Davies, 2024

History

Collection: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Permanent Collection
Credit Line: Gift of Dora FitzGerald, 2008
Related Exhibitions: That Directionless Light of the Future: Rediscovering Russell FitzGerald

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