Behold

>|| So, I got to the point where I thought, give me a dollar fifty, and we’ll just say, ‘behold the miracle’, because the more I thought about it, the more I realised it wasn’t a miracle in the terms of being a supernatural event; it was marvellous and it was wondrous, but it wasn’t really a miracle; and the more I looked under it, the more I became convinced of this |[inaudible]| So it all gets down to saying, ‘and if it were a miracle, it’s only a whitefella miracle’—if you get down, right down to translating it, if you find out what makes it tick, you’ve regrettably destroyed it || So I’d got to the point where I thought I could explain it in some terms but that I had destroyed its status as a miracle; yet, looking at this painting—and when that’s what you really should do in a strong way, you just look at the painting—what comes to me then is that one is witnessing it in the way that a religious believer might say one can ‘behold the miracle’ | And let me stress that split in the verb: to ‘be’ and to ‘hold’; holding as being and being held by it—isn’t that a miracle?

Image:  Doreen Chapman Untitled (Mona Lisa), 2017 101.5 x 91.5 cm Acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Spinifex Hill Studios, South Headland, Western Australia