When the outer panels are closed, it shows a monochrome painting of the creation of the world, on a flat landscape enclosed in a transparent sphere with God the father looking down.
The use of monochrome or what is known as grace for the outer panels of a triptych was quite conventional and is there to set the stage for the explosion of color within.
For some years early in the 1960s he had played around with dabs and zigzags of monochrome paint on canvases which he called “Chronomes”, but he concluded that time was more orderly than that.