Image of the Week: Forest Womb
© Durga Yael Bernhard
This painting was just purchased yesterday by a dear friend who came to visit during this weekend's art studio tour. It's one of my larger and more obscure paintings, from my collection of art inspired by years of active hunting during my thirties and forties. I don't hunt so much anymore, and haven't exhibited this collection, so it's a good example of what you can find when you visit an artist's studio.
Forest Womb expresses the profound sense of place in the food chain that I've gained from decades of hunting my own meat and foraging wild plants and mushrooms for teas and medicines. Rather than being stacked or linear like most diagrams of the food chain, this one is nested – an opening within an opening within an opening.
For my fortieth birthday, I went on a one-week guided bear hunt in Maine, and returned not only with a chest full of bear meat but a deep sense of connection to the forest – so deep, that the order of nesting shown here has the bear consuming me. At the center of this arrangement are the red clover flowers that are so favored by deer (and humans like me). The red clover is inside the deer, and the deer (or venison) is inside the woman. But even though it was I who ate this bear, it is the bear who consumed me. In the week that I spent in motionless silence in a tree stand in the wilderness, I felt completely absorbed into the dense Maine forest, as if the world of the bear had taken me in and digested me. My feeling of communion with my surroundings was so profound that I didn't even care if I succeeded in this hunt in which I had invested so much preparation, money, and time. I was blissed out on feeling knitted into the wilderness around me, and that was enough.
It wasn't until the last hour of light on the last day of the hunt that this bear presented herself to me. She came within eight yards of my tree stand, and I made a perfect heart shot. She was dead in less than five seconds. (She did not have cubs or any milk – hunters are not allowed to shoot mother bears.)
Two weeks later, I became pregnant with my third child, and ate the entire bear during my pregnancy. (No wonder my daughter is so fiercely willful!) The meat is indescribably rich and nourishing.
Two years after that, I finally found the time to bring this image into form. I remember nursing my daughter while working on it.
The death of that bear gave birth to something new in me that is still part of me today. I still have that bear pelt on my bed and its skull in my living room. I still honor the bear, and the forest it lived in, for taking me into its intricate web of life.
The Shandaken Art Studio tour is still going on today. I'll be open until 7pm. If you're local, stop by. I have almost 1000 paintings out on display and stacked in piles. You never know what you'll find!
D Yael Bernhard