Ali Banisadr on Nicolas Poussin Critics Page: Painting as Contemplation in a Time of Upheaval

Poussin was a painter of order, of logic, of restraint—yet within that, he contained the storm. He painted during a time of political and religious upheaval, yet his works often suggest a deep desire to resolve disorder into harmony.

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This summer I’ve been painting in the Hudson Valley, and the landscape has opened itself to me in unexpected ways. I’ve always loved landscape painting, but now that I live within it—inside a forest, surrounded by the slow rhythms of light and air and growth—my understanding of it has changed. Poussin’s landscapes, so often seen as mythological or classical, suddenly feel vivid and real. He wasn’t just painting Arcadia as a fiction. He was painting the lived experience of nature as metaphor, nature as story, nature as force.

Recently I completed a painting called The Flood, a work that finds some of its lineage in Poussin’s The Deluge (at the Louvre). Like his, mine is a vision of apocalyptic nature, of humanity engulfed by water and time. But it also echoes older myths—the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Biblical deluge, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. What interests me is how this myth recurs across cultures: the flood as both punishment and purification, a communication from the gods. My version of the flood shares something with Poussin’s: the horror of the sublime, the moment when nature reclaims everything. But where his painting organizes the chaos into visual coherence, mine perhaps dwells more in the turbulence itself.