Image of the Week: Japanese Woman, Reincarnated
© Durga Yael Bernhard
Every now and then I receive a commission to create a personal portrait. Usually it’s a pet, a house, a view from a house, or a family. This one was most unusual: a young man, married with three children, felt strongly he was the reincarnation of a Japanese woman. Growing up in the New York area, he had always been attracted to all things Japanese, and also felt he was truly a woman. After living with her, or as her, all his life, he wanted a portrait of his alternative identity.
This was most challenging for me as an artist. Needless to say, I had no visual reference to work from, no photo of this Japanese woman who had reincarnated through my client – only a photo of the client himself, who had curly blond hair, and of his wife. I wondered what it was like for her, living with two people in her husband’s body. He had a vision of his previous incarnation wearing a silk kimono and combing her long black hair, so I grasped onto this tidbit and used it to determine the woman’s pose. Movement or action always makes an illustration more engaging, and with so little to go by, I decided to make the woman’s hair flow into a sort of wavy current that encompasses both characters. Nestled into the folds of these waves are my client's suburban American home and the Japanese house where I imagined his former self lived. Holding the tension between his two lives, he reaches down to hold his wife and kids, and upward to grasp his counterpart's silky black hair.
Was this man just imagining an alter ego, or sensing his own feminine side? Was he suffering from a psychological disorder, a split personality? I did not know, and didn’t care. It wasn’t my job to analyze or judge. Once I did a portrait of a friend threatened by cancer who envisioned herself on fire, her superficial persona and priorities burned away by the life-threatening illness, leaving behind a purified being. I painted her vision without questioning the validity of it or her theory of her cancer’s purpose. Fifteen years later, my friend is still alive. Here, too, I was acting as a mediator, a visual interlocutor between inner vision and outer form.
People can clearly imagine and visualize that which they cannot express themselves. I, too, receive visions that are difficult to translate into form, no matter how clearly they appear in my mind’s eye. Only patient years of practice have enabled me to bridge that gap, sometimes more successfully, sometimes less. I don’t know if I perfectly satisfied my client’s desire to manifest his Japanese self in an image – the whole process was as much therapeutic as artistic – but he bought the painting happily and I never heard from him again.
As always, I strive to build bridges between art and life . . . and sometimes, between art and past lives.
Looking for a unique portrait of someone or something you love? Respond directly to this newsletter for more information.
A good week to all!
D Yael Bernhard