The Golem
^{Pastel and etched glass, 2005, signed lower right}

Size: 40" x 60"

'Find the cover you like least on a book by my wife or me and redesign it and I'll have a look,' so said Ira Wood to me in September 2002 at Worcester, Mass's Tatnuck Bookseller. I'd been hoping to paint a book cover for his Leapfrog Press. I took his advice, found the cover I liked the least and brought the book home.

I had read the book now through to its end, and still held it there in my hands, as though all this time I had been fumbling in my own brain, and not inside a book at all. Everything the voice had uttered was there within me, had been there all my life, though smothered and forgotten, choked down beneath the weight of my own thoughts, till this the day of delivery.

The book I brought home was Marge Piercy's "He, She and It" and it marked the beginning of the leg of a journey which is ongoing.

It was no longer a book that spoke to me. It was a voice. A voice that wanted somthing from me

And this much I understand of the voice: I was to retell the story of the Golem of Prague using the language that has become my own over these past several years. -Lawrence Strauss, March 2005

Quotations on this page from "The Golem" by Gustav Meyrink, translated by Madge Pemberton, published by Dover.