Image of the Week: First Kill
© Durga Yael Bernhard
With hunting season upon us here in the Northeast, this painting seems like a good one to share from my collection of older works. First Kill is about 10" wide, and dates back to 1992, when I had been researching plains Indian culture for a picture book I was illustrating. Spotted Eagle & Black Crow (Holiday House, 1993) is a retelling of a Lakota folktale that compelled me to learn about everything from the arrangement of teepees in a village to the patterns of beads on moccasins. The story centered around the quest for honor – for eagle feathers, symbolic of power and the Great Spirit. Death begot life in the ritual hunt, as much a statement of honor as a means of survival. The tightly structured beliefs and evocative stories of these tribes inspired images of ritual movement, the interaction of motion and structure. I chose fluid, organic forms for the two figures and the buffalo, and geometric shapes to represent the cultural context in which the hunt took place.
Pictured here is the climactic moment of a young warrior's first kill. I started by creating a surface of peeled birchbark glued flat on matboard. On the left, the warmer, darker side of the birchbark faces up, showing through as the wildly kicking buffalo, its body adorned with painted triangles and trapezoids, plus clippings of fern stems that I glued on top. On the right, the lighter side of the birchbark shows through the two human silhouettes, embedded with dashes of woody fiber that I saw as lines of energy. These lines point mostly toward the buffalo, except for the father's right arm lifted in a gesture of support toward his son. The boy is poised to thrust his spear as the father encourages his son over the threshold to manhood.
Harsh realities surround this proud buffalo, driven to exhaustion by the nimble-footed horse, and the warriors who leap to the ground to confront their prey. Such a hunt takes nothing less than a fierce warrior, who brings to bear upon this kill a culture we can little comprehend.
I actually did very little painting here – mostly just the background. I only used four colors, in flat gouache paint, my chosen medium for many years. The geometric forms are taken from indigenous art of the region, as well as my own mental repository of decorative shapes. These shapes continually multiply in my mind, so that I must be careful not to overuse them. Many were off-loaded into other paintings. I'll try to find an example to post next week.
A good and fruitful week to all!
D Yael Bernhard