Image of the Week: The Bearers
© Durga Yael Bernhard
Roots and leaves are interesting visual symbols. They speak to the passage of time. Roots may be thought of as the origins or cause of something, which then unfolds in foliage and finally culminates in flowers and fruit. The roots are the past; the branches and leaves are the present, and the blossoms and seeds are the future. If used effectively, these symbols are intuitively understood.
The Bearers was an offshoot (no pun intended) of an illustration commissioned to convey the concept of group cooperation. In the original piece, the publisher wanted a group of people who are literally rooted in the same cause. It was similar to what you see above, with simpler figures. After the assignment was finished, I revisioned the concept in terms of motherhood. Mothers bear more than children – they also bear the many challenges of motherhood, from scraped knees to college applications. I envisioned the community of mothers in which I found common ground – women with whom I could swap childcare or coping strategies, and who understood the sleepless nights and myriad delights of raising children. We were all making our way through this journey of motherhood. As bearers of life, we were truly rooted in the earth – a collective of both nature and human design.
Often when I'm working on a commercial assignment, I get offshoot ideas like this. They seem worthy of expression, but don't fit the context. So I create a new context – a new home for my idea. The beautiful thing about visual art is that there need not ever be a final version. You can always create another original. Some of my ideas exist in multiple versions – which may or may not get executed on paper or canvas, as opposed to running loose in my head for years or dissolving back into my unconscious. They rise and fall, like waves.
What a continuum of phases motherhood is! In this painting, one woman is pregnant, one is nursing, and another is simply holding her growing child as he stretches up within her protective embrace. The central figure in back, I imagine, is a grandmother. These could all be aspects of one mother moving through time, rather than separate women. They overlap as a cluster, with the different stages of motherhood forming a whole.
I forgot one phase of the journey: the empty nest – what I'm facing now as my youngest child, now 19, has one foot and her whole head out the door. My two older kids live far away. And I'm trying to figure out how to give birth to a new chapter in my own life – one in which I'm mostly just cooking for myself (what a concept!) – and my dog, who gets homemade dog food.
For the next few weeks I'll be featuring images of motherhood in anticipation of Mother's Day. Want to give a unique image as a gift? The Bearers and many other paintings in the "Fertility, Pregnancy, and Birth" or "Mothering, Fathering, and Family" sections of my website gallery may be printed as posters or cards from my webstore. Please contact me with any questions.
Happy May to all my readers!