Image of the Week: Inner Light
I painted this image a few nights ago, as the first deep cold took hold in the Northeast. Here in my valley of the Catskills, we're blanketed in nineteen inches of snow. Dusk falls earlier each day; winter is closing in. There's a certain apprehension in the air, compounded by political unrest and a pandemic of isolation, fear, and sickness. The winter that stretches before us looks interminably long – a feeling I experience individually but also share with so many others.
Curled up in the darkness, this little woman spilled out of my brush. She's not trying to solve anything. She's hibernating, or listening to the earth. She could be dreaming, reflecting, grieving or healing, sleeping, imagining, breathing the fragrance of soil – or just waiting. She's burrowing in the dark, and incubating light.
The animals of the forest that surround my home have just settled into their underground nests. Squirrel activity is minimal; rabbits are no longer seen; chipmunks and foxes are gone; bears no longer disturb neighborhood bird feeders and garbage bins. All through the winter, these creatures will sleep, nesting within the earth, within themselves, preserving their precious life energy and incubating the growth that will awaken spring.
Can we do the same, if only just within our human psyche? As the magnolia trees have already formed their fuzzy springtime buds, born of the seed pods that dropped in the fall – can we, too, start budding in winter? Can we make a nest of the very darkness that surrounds us, curl up around our own secret, inner light? That's the spirit of Chanukah, of Christmas, of Solstice – to kindle light in the darkness, and to find a spark of new life within death.
The painting itself is done in acrylics on what's known as an artist's conk – a type of hard shelf fungus with a suede-like underside. It's amazing by how well this surface takes paint. Conks tend to have natural flaws, however – some of which I touched up in Photoshop to improve the image you see here, which is just about actual size.
Solstice is about as close as we can get to a scientific holiday – the season turns with our earth's movement in relation to the sun. Yet it's also spiritual in the meaning we bring to it. Most important, Solstice is universal: the turning of the light is shared by all – no matter who you are, what you believe, or where you live. I like that.
Happy Solstice to all! May you find your own inner light in this season of darkness.
D Yael Bernhard