Brooklyn, NY – Artist Paints The Torah Laws

Brooklyn, NY – A Brooklyn artist has completed what he calls the largest free-standing painting in the world – a 1,700-square-foot depiction of the Torah’s 613 commandments.

Sunset Park muralist and Brooklyn College art professor Archie Rand, whose artwork has graced the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, has turned his easel toward the Old Testament, using cartoons to depict commandments like “eat matzo on the night of Passover.”

“This came rather naturally to me,” said Rand, 58, a nonobservant Jew whose painting is being stored in a Clinton Hill warehouse. “The idea of doing this was so enormous that the challenge of it seemed a likable one. The pure silliness of the actual number of commandments that needed attention was what drew me.”

Using acrylic paint, Rand illustrated as many as 20 commandments in one week until finally finishing in 2006, each canvas drawn in the style of comics he read as a kid.

“What I wanted to do was come up with a distinctive image for each commandment that would be memorable with or without the explanation from the text,” said Rand.

Each of the commandments, such as “To have fringes on the corners of your garments” and “To break the neck of the first born donkey if the owner doesn’t redeem it,” is illustrated on separate canvases that hang from dry wall.

A cartoon egg with arms and legs is perched upon a stool and shouting into a woman’s ear to depict the Jewish commandment “Observe the laws of menstrual impurity.”

A huge open mouth, in midscream, is painted to illustrate the command, “Not to insult or harm anybody with words.”