Diptych in the fourth dimension
Watercolour, gouache,crayon
and Photoshop™
©2013 Charlene Brown
The right panel of
this diptych is based on a photograph I took on a University
of Victoria Travel Study program in Egypt
in 2008. It shows a relief sculpture (reassembled from shards) on a wall
in Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri, across the river from Luxor. (The mural
illustrates an expedition to the Land
of Punt, an exotic country on the Red
Sea coast in what is now Northern Sudan.)
The left panel shows the pyramids of the Black Pharaohs, also located in what is now Northern Sudan – I’ve never seen them, but I
find their design fascinating. They are smaller, pointier and far more numerous
than the more famous pyramids near Cairo.
The fact they were built in about the 5th century BCE nine hundred
years after the gardens of Punt were sculpted at Deir el-Bahri in the 14th
century BCE, and are near the Nile, rather than the Red Sea, stopped me
briefly… until I thought of presenting
the time/space divide as a diptych…
