Elohim creating Adam

Elohim Creating Adam (1795) belongs to Blake's series of large color prints — a unique experimental technique combining printing and hand-finishing — and represents his most powerful statement about the problematic nature of material creation. Blake's Elohim is not the benevolent God of conventional Christianity but the Demiurge of his mythological system, a figure whose creation of the material body traps the infinite spiritual being within finite flesh. The worm coiled around Adam's leg identifies creation with the forces of material limitation and mortality — Blake's radical inversion of the Genesis creation narrative makes this one of his most theologically provocative images.

Blake's large color print technique involves printing from a millboard painted with pigment mixed with carpenter's glue, producing a textured, broken surface quite different from conventional etching or engraving. Each print is unique because of hand-finishing; this version in the Tate shows particularly powerful handling of the dark, brooding sky against which Elohim's figure looms.