Image of the Week: Cup of Joy
© Durga Yael Bernhard
Here is another Biblical illustration I did in the early 2000s for a progressive Christian publisher. My editor wanted something universal, timeless, hopeful – an image of the marriage of heaven and earth, with all people participating in the celebration. To be honest, I can't remember the exact passage – but one of the nice things about spiritual imagery is that it can bypass the content and speak to whatever is meaningful to the viewer. My favorite example of this was when another Biblical illustration I did was licensed by a women's health clinic in Utah for use on their website. They had no idea that the image, which for them symbolized personal empowerment, was originally a religious one. That was fine with me.
A cup is symbolic of many things. As an archetype, the cup is the feminine, a receptacle of divine energy. A cup is a ritual object for making a blessing. Jesus holds aloft a cup of wine at the Last Supper, offering his essence to his disciples. In Kabbalah, all people are seen as cups, and God as the eternal giver. And an overflowing cup represents eternal life, as it is written in Psalm 23:
My cup runneth over . . . surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Eternal forever.
For me, even the thought of an overflowing cup brings a positive feeling to mind! Just thinking about it makes me want to draw another one . . .
Then there is the Buddhist story of the broken cup, in which the cup is emblematic of impermanence. Many versions of this story exist.
The contents of this particular cup is not water, or any liquid. It's abundant life and good will – in a word, joy. My cup reaches all the way from the bottom of the picture plane (earth) to the top (heaven). It is both held by and filled with overlapping hands of different ethnicities. Flowering vines entwine with the fingers of these hands and grow outside the cup, spilling over. The background color is a gradient that changes from teal to magenta – one of my favorite color combinations. These colors offset the earthy colors inside the cup.
The shape of the cup, sliced like a cross-section, also makes an interesting column, or passage, between heaven and earth. These symmetrical curves can vary in as many ways as there are styles of wine glasses and goblets. Rubin's vase takes the concept even further by creating the profiles of two faces in the negative space of a goblet-shaped vase, challenging our perception of figure and ground.
What are your associations with cups?
I've received quite a few orders for greeting cards of this image over the years. You can order one too by filling in the name of the image here.
A good week to all!
D Yael Bernhard