Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”“I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. 

Genesis 4:8-10

Brother kills brother, a violent bloody mess. So how do I go about rendering the passage? The narrative is sparse. God accepts Abel’s offering and rejects Cain’s, with no explanation given. Cain lured Abel out into a field and killed him, but how? There are no details of place or time. We want to know why, it must be jealousy, right, well maybe not, we are not told. If we can understand why and how we can pullout meaning and gain some ground to stand on. The narrative is less an action and more a position of being. 

I chose to focus on the action and then the aftermath. It’s a sequence of violence and grief, but circular not linear. I did several parings of drawings as I struggled with the story. William Blake’s “Cain Fleeing” was always in the back of my mind. I looked at the master story tellers the Baroque artist to see what they had to say. The sinewy muscularity was helpful, but needed some tamping down.

In the first image of Cain killing Abel I used Jacobo Palma’s depiction of Cain as a model and juxtaposed Caravaggio’s painting of Saul blinded by the light as the model for the slaughtered Abel, it seemed appropriate. The second image of the shattered Cain was inspired by the spirit of Goya.

My initial set is very dramatic, rendered in robust flourishes of line.    How do you render pain? With the second set I decided to suck all the air out by limiting the drawings to stark lines and heavy tones in a void of white paper. I think the second set may be the most honest. The third set I leaned into the emotional power of color, triggered by the vision of the ground soaked in red blood.

Abel’s blood called out to God from the ground, is that just poetic? Abel’s blood pouring into the ground is more than his life spilling out. It is the loss of future generations and their spreading potential being cutoff. The loss so painful that the generations called out from the ground. This insight is not original to me. 

How is potential cut off? It’s cut off by violence. It is easy to point to violence, murder of course, genocide, oppression yes. Broken promises and withdrawal of support is a violence that erases a future. Refusing to listen to those we claim to love and demanding  our way is a self centered act of violence that cuts down the other. We are to love the other as we love ourselves. Love requires a free choice to lay down our position for others.

What it comes down to is the violence in my heart. That violence is rooted in fear. As they say what we fear will come upon us. I am Cain and I am Abel, both murder and murdered. That’s what I got out of the story.