Image of the Week: Springtime, Peck Hollow
© D. Yael Bernhard
Springtime is my favorite time of year for landscape painting. I love the pale apricot and sallow green, the emerging ochre and blushing pink. For the three weeks of peak spring color here in the Catskills, I feel like I'm driving through an Impressionist painting. The texture of the trees, made of flower buds and baby leaves, is finer than usual, lending a pointillist quality to the mountains. The gentle blend of hues is both pleasing and comforting to the eye.
This year I had time to paint only one springtime landscape, while teaching an art class a few weeks ago. It was a cold and blustery spring day with intermittent showers, so I parked across the field from this cabin, and my two young homeschooling students and I sketched in the car. Back at home, we took out gouache paints and working from photos and memory, finished what I call "color sketches" – simple works on paper that are basically drawings tinted with color washes. Color sketches may be used as visual notes to create larger paintings, acting as a stepping stone that enables the artist to further change or simplify the scene. The goal in landscape painting, I told my students, is not to duplicate reality, but to interpret, enhance, or otherwise transform it.
Peck Hollow sits between two long spurs of North Dome Mountain, as does my house on the other side of one of those spurs. There's only one house in this hollow, with forest preserve all along the road. This particular cabin has been abandoned since before the turn of the millennium, yet someone continues to mow the lawn at least once a year.
Walking Peck Hollow time and again over the years, I've grown especially fond of the stream that runs along its length, with its clay-colored ribbon of what appears to be some kind of iron-rich rock visible through the water, creating unique rock formations. I've found chaga (fungal conks used for tea and medicine) here, and picked thimbleberries – neither of which can be found in stores. Reishi mushrooms grow in the hemlock groves, and minks nest in the stream banks. After heavy rains, red efts (salamanders) wiggle out of the coltsfoot leaves growing along the ditch; I've rescued a few from the dusty dirt road, though hours can go by here with nary a passing vehicle.
As I sat gazing across this field and drawing the familiar scene that I've seen in every season of the year, through all kinds of weather – I wondered if I could bring my intimacy with this mountain valley into the painting. I could certainly add more detail, but that wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to infuse the painting with something more than just the scene at hand: a sense of what it feels like to be here, to walk the earth and breathe the air.
In the end I found no answer other than to make the place seem alive. The way to invest a scene with life is to lighten up one's brushwork – to work quickly, with loose lines, open spaces, allowing suggestion, minimizing closed objects, and keeping things simple. The less control, the more vitality. Again and again in Post-Impressionist landscapes, I see tightly-composed but loosely-executed paintings. Houses, trees, and even mountains are so lightly evoked, they appear almost to be dancing. Cézanne's many renderings of Mont Saint Victoire come to mind, as well as Van Gogh's pulsing, swirling landscapes. Even this landscape by Paul Klee, with its childish character, speaks of something more than its physical features. We do not know what experiences have invested these scenes with meaning for the artists who painted them, but their intimacy with the land emerges in their handling of the subject matter – how trees are suggested, how scale recedes with distance and spaciousness is achieved, how patterns in the landscape are simplified into geometric shapes. This is what enlivens a landscape, and makes it more than the sum of its parts.
I'm a firm believer that walking Peck Hollow, foraging there, taking my daughter and her friends to swim in the stream when they were little, walking my dog there year after year, all trickled into this modest color sketch. As in life, so in art. As my old Jungian mentor Winifred told me, "You fill the channels of your Unconscious with what you want to influence you, then you sit back and wait to see what emerges." The kind of waiting she meant involves patience and faith. Not always easy. I like to think of my springtime walks as enrichment for future paintings. It's a soothing thought for the part of me that's frustrated I didn't get to do more landscape painting this year, before the sweet pastels of spring slipped away. At the same time, I'm grateful I got to paint even this much. That cabin is like an old friend.
A good week to all!
D Yael Bernhard