A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
This quotation is from Thesis IX in Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (the full text is available on various web sites).
While researching Cy Twombly's Treatise on the Veil (Second Version) I chanced across a quotation from Paul Klee which I used as the title for my first “scribble drawing”: Writing and drawing are fundamentally the same.
Through Twombly, I made the connection between my writing / drawing act, Klee’s angel, and Benjamin’s vision of history.
For my first drawing I made use of only charcoal black. Because Klee’s angel painting is color, I decided to experiment with a few of my colored pencils. Yellow did not produce the desired effect. At the end of the drawing process I still felt like I needed some charcoal black to lend a degree of seriousness to the painting that a fully colored rendering seemed to lack.
Obviously, Klee wasn’t thinking about Benjamin’s vision of the Angel of History, so my drawing expresses an expanded context and possibly an explicit rendering of the storm of progress in the form of the charcoal black that seems to hover above each of the angel’s wings.
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