Be! كن

"I have looked at the universe and its design, at what was concealed and its inscription, and I saw that the whole universe was a tree, the root of whose light is from the seed ‘Be!’."
— Ibn Arabi


Acrylic, mica pigment, iridescent medium, ink, metal leaf on Fabriano Murillo paper 360 gsm. 50x50 cm.

Date3 July 2012
StatusSold
PrintsRedbubble
Category,

Kun كُن is the imperative of the verb kana, to be. As described in Cosmology and Architecture in Premodern Islam, “Kun (Be!) was God’s first uttered word, and kawn (the world) was the immediate
outcome of this utterance.”

One thinks long before tackling such a concept, but in the end I fell back on basic geometry (the closer to the source, the simpler things get): I found I could reduce the word in such a way that the 3 primordial shapes of square, circle and triangle were prominent. The star formation is along the lines of the shamsiyya (sun) motif which in arabesque symbolizes the first manifestation; it is a concept that can be understood as the big-bang, here issuing from the void.

A penny for your thoughts...