Image of the Week: The Child Within
© Durga Yael Bernhard
Here's another mother-and-child image that I did when my youngest was a toddler. From the beginning, she was so different from me, sometimes I wondered how I gave birth to this creature. The same is true of my two older kids as well, to some degree. At the same time, I see myself in them, as they mirror back some of my own traits. This tension of opposite/sameness makes parenting both gratifying and challenging.
So I created this brush drawing expressing the concept of a child that is a perfect inversion of its mother. Where she is dark, the child is light, and where she is light, the child is dark – yet they're the same shape, their postures mirroring each other. Could this be my own inner child – my nascent self?
I find these dichotomies make rich subjects for visual art.
Brush drawing is a technique that I developed during my daughter's early years. It began as a practical matter – a way of anchoring an idea and working out tonal relationships without having to do a finished painting. Brush drawings are quick, loose, and freeing. In this case, the coarse, buff-colored paper enabled me to lay down a pleasing texture as well – so pleasing that I found myself wanting to do brush drawings for their own sake.
With its interrelated positive and negative shapes, this particular concept would translate well into a linoleum block print. I would be inclined to introduce color not into the figures, but the background – perhaps suggestive of the child's incipient nature or future destiny. The flat, graphic nature of the figures themselves should be preserved, making this drawing a poor candidate for a painting.
Knowing how – or even whether – to translate a sketch or a drawing into a finished color piece is one of the most challenging aspects of my work. Often I feel torn, standing at a fork in the road, unable to decide which way to go. Sometimes I go one way and fail, only to start out again the other way. One technique I've discovered for dealing with this kind of impasse is to place the drawing at some distance, perhaps propped up on a chair, while riding my spinning cycle within view of it, or while playing my djembe drum in front of it. Physical movement softens the mind and enables an image to sink into the unconscious. If you don't believe me, try perusing the images in an art book while walking on a treadmill or pedaling a stationary bicycle. You might find it makes a deep impression with very little mental effort on your part. This is how I study art myself. That's another skill I gained from motherhood – the art of multitasking. Now that my kids are all grown, I'm trying to give that one up.
A good week to all!