When I began providing certain of the figures in my paintings with wings, viewers referred to them as angels. Was I painting angels? That had not been my initial intention. I painted wings as devices that instead of increasing freedom often steal it away. The wings are heavy metallic forms, mostly patched together from recycled material, uncomfortable and perhaps hurting. In the name of power, riches, freedom and well-being, Man often steals from himself. And of course from others.

These thoughts were accompanied by other reflections as well. I thought of the tragedies of Icarus and Isaac, and of the sacrifice of Israeli fighter plane pilots, many of them sons of prominent pioneers of the Jewish state, who battled to sustain their fathers' dream and paid with their lives. I thought also of the iconography of the crucifixion. Exploring the art of the Renaissance I focused on Dürer's Melancholia, and transformed his figure a good number of times. This expanded the kinds of winged figures in my paintings and gave them open-ended meanings.

The process of painting is after all a struggle with an angel, perhaps a struggle with God, certainly a struggle with oneself. I produce paintings but do not know how to explain the enigma of their making. Shouldn't my weary angel-like figures be entitled to some credit? What is their part in my ongoing evocation of the mystery of life?

Many miracles have punctuated my life: the miracle of my survival, of living in a free world where art has the right to exist, of my own fortunate career -- all these have given the non-believer in me a strange feeling of awe, a feeling that benevolent angels have guarded me. Are there such angels? Do they still mediate between God and human beings, as in the time of Genesis? If they understand the mysteries of our time, could they explain them to me?

The piteously man-made angels that populate my paintings do not pretend to represent such unearthly beings. My spent and aged angels with their heavy wings are emanations of the inevitably constricted human imagination. At best they serve as Messengers among our varying human spheres of perception. I wonder whether these Angel Messengers can help us, or whether we don't encumber their ill-fitting wings by giving them impossible tasks. In my perpetual questioning I ask them to carry undecipherable messages from a God-fearing atheist to some superior presence, some silent voice from which like Job I seek adequate answers but fear I will receive none.

Text by Samuel Bak, from Between Worlds: The Paintings of Samuel Bak from 1946-2000.