Thirty-Fourth Psalm,1988
Offset Lithograph
Edition of 25
22 x 30 in
Collaborative Printer: Bob Franklin
Landau knew he was an artist at eleven years old, when the principal of his Philadelphia grammar school handed him a bottle of Higgins India ink. What followed was a childhood spent in relentless looking. He studied life drawing at twelve at the Graphic Sketch Club, the institution now known as the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, and spent his free hours roaming the city in search of subjects: street markets, railroad yards, boats in the harbor, children at play, the homeless, old barns, the animals at the zoo, the landscapes of Fairmount Park. He wanted to capture all of it. But Landau was equally voracious as a reader and thinker, drawn to books, to storytelling, to knowledge for its own sake. Both instincts, the eye and the mind, would define everything that came after.
Thirty-Fourth Psalm draws directly from that second impulse. Literary and scriptural reference run through Landau's practice across painting, printmaking, and illustration, and here the source is Psalm 34, its repeated Hebrew word shalom, peace, woven into the composition alongside the English phrase "seek peace and pursue it." The verses that ground the work are unambiguous in their moral weight: depart from evil, do good, pursue peace not as a passive condition but as an active one. For Landau, text was never decorative. It was argument, belief made visible.
