Image of the Week: Kaditah Valley
© D. Yael Bernhard
This is one of my few landscape paintings that I completed on site. I shlepped my art supplies halfway around the world to northern Israel, and made my way to this heavenly valley outside the ancient city of Tzfat (Safed), where my two friends and I rented a tzimmer (cottage) for two nights. The place was funky, but the location was an artist's paradise.
Surrounded by wild olive and fig trees, with herds of goats and untended cows grazing the scrubby hills, I plunked myself down on the rough earth, opened my travel portfolio, and took out a sheet of 18"x24" heavyweight watercolor paper. Squinting into the distance, I realized the furthest ridge to the east was over the border into Syria; and to the north, also not far, was Lebanon. That's Israel – a land of paradox, where a bucolic valley is surrounded by hostility. Tens of thousands of rockets were pointed at the ground I was sitting on, yet Israelis go about their lives unperturbed by the existential threat that surrounds them. See the little white rectangle sticking up above the uppermost white rocks? That's a bomb shelter.
White rocks are characteristic of the Galilee, as are the scrubby shapes of olive trees. The land itself, rising up from the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), is as convoluted as the bark of an ancient olive. It's not so easy to walk across these valleys, what with their buckled ravines known as wadis in the Middle East (or arroyos in the American Southwest). It was early July, well after the rainy season ended, and I loved the golden color of the earth and burnt hues that emerged from the shadows. As always, the sky was a clear, featureless blue. So I filled almost the entire picture with land, leaving just a sliver of sky to lend a sense of perspective.
I used a technique here of placing large objects in the foreground to create contrast of scale between near and far. But these objects – a single fig tree and some wild grasses – are rendered in a crude and blurry manner, even though they're closer to the viewer. I like making the foreground suggestive and the distance more precise. The objects close at hand create a sort of perceptual frame, but to me, the far view is more interesting.
Eventually this painting was licensed as a label for a box of Israeli tea – along with another painting I did in the Judean desert, and two more that were commissioned to go with them. Each flavor of tea features native plants from different regions in Israel. You can find Shalva Tea here – the labels I painted are called Ein Gedi, Arava, Jersusalem, and Galil. I highly recommend these teas!
A good week to all!