Image of the Week: Sangro de Cristo Mountains
© Durga Yael Bernhard
This landscape painting was done on location in the summer of 2006 in the beautiful Sangro de Cristo mountains of New Mexico. I was visiting my cousin Steve, who died eight years later. He was still robust at the time, unaware that cancer was gestating in his lungs. Steve was a real character – a happy-go-lucky guy with a great sense of humor. He loved horses, and had a ranch in Colorado for a while.
I brought my acrylics when I went to visit Steve in Santa Fe, and a cardboard portfolio with 22"x30" watercolor paper. I asked him to help me find a good view of the mountains in a place where I could set up my paints. Steve walked with a limp, and couldn't hike – and I couldn't go very far with my bulky art supplies – so he drove me to a ski slope north of the city. There I was able to climb for just twenty minutes to reach this spacious view. The slope was covered with scrubby grass and rocks. Dark conifers marched down the mountainside, allowing me to suggest receding space by use of diminishing scale. I was elated.
Steve gave me just one hour to paint while he waited at the bottom, slouching against a light pole by the empty parking lot, reading a magazine. I remember his black sunglasses, and the hot sun glinting off the top of his bald head visible below as I climbed. Once I found my spot, I worked quickly, struggling to keep my paper level, with my portfolio serving as a crude table. I covered the whole paper with basic shapes and "visual notes" – notes on the geometry of these western conifers; the particular hues hidden in the shadows (curiously, magenta); the position of clouds in the sky. I articulated the patterns of just one tree, so that it could serve as a model for the others. With enough color and line down on paper, I could finish the painting later from a photograph.
Compositions come alive on the page when drawn directly from nature. Texture and detail are easier to capture. Even the best photograph can't impart the sense of expansion one feels in being there, breathing the mountain air, watching the clouds in their voluminous glory, feeling the tiny pebbles broken down from the rugged and soaring summits digging into one's ankle. I savored that hour, and tried to infuse my painting with the immensity of my surroundings.
I brought a few of those pebbles home, unintentionally.
Sangro de Cristo Mountains hangs in my living room now as a reminder not just of those majestic peaks and valleys, but of Steve himself. He's greatly missed. So are his jokes.
The day after Cuz Steve died, a black horse appeared to me in a dream. It wore no saddle or bridle. Its coat glistened in the sun, and its mane blew in the breeze like fine black silk. The horse stopped in the middle of a meadow and stood gazing directly at me for a moment – then turned and galloped away, free.
I like to imagine Steve cavorting around in those beautiful mountains, limp-free.
Here's a detail of my painting Still Life in the Sukkah, in which Steve's photo and yarzheit candle are depicted.
But even more than a photo, memories weave themselves into the land.
And into paintings.
Wishing you a good and peaceful week –