Thirty-Fourth Psalm

About the Work

From the Artist

I knew I wanted to be an artist when, in the sixth grade, the principal of my grammar school gave me a bottle of Higgins India ink, precipitating a crisis of self-awareness. During the next six years I drew and painted incessantly; I studied life drawing at the age of 12, at the Graphic Sketch Club (now the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial) in Philadelphia, my hometown; I roamed all over the city in search of “subjects"—street markets, railroad trains, boats in the harbor oh, children at play, the homeless, old barns, landscapes in Fairmount Park (which became my second home), animals at the zoo. Thus, my first stage of development as an artist was essentially mimetic; I had fallen in love with the world of appearances and wanted to capture it all. But because I was also intensely curious, I also fell in love with books, with knowledge for its own sake, and with storytelling. While still in junior high school, I wrote, designed the set for, and acted in a play about the importance of mathematics; studied geologic ages of the Earth; designed (on paper) a scale model of our solar system; read the complete Edgar Allan Poe, and the first science fiction magazine in America, Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories.
_{—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records}

Literary references are integral to Landau’s paintings, prints, and illustrations. The repeated Hebrew word shalom (peace) and the English phrase “seek peace and pursue it” that appear in this print are taken from Jewish scripture, Psalm 34.
_{—Adapted from https://www.philamuseum.org/collection/object/307052, accessed 6-29-2021}

Who is the man that desires life, and loves days, that he may see good therein?
Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking guile.
Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it.
_{—Psalm 34, verses 13–15}