Image of the Week: The Invisible World
"I'd like to take this opportunity to show a really interesting face."
That's what Daven, author of the Power of the Yin oracle deck that I'm illustrating, wrote in her comments on my sketch for one out of 56 cards. She provided me with three photos for inspiration: an African girl staring from behind a curtain; an Amazonian elder with a wizened and wrinkled face; and an Armenian woman dressed in traditional festive garb. All were wearing different styles of beads around their necks. I pondered the faces: why had Daven chosen these three? Certainly they were intriguing.
I decided not to ask, and let the seed germinate.
Up until now, the face in the illustration hadn't been my main concern. It was the background – or rather, the concept and title of the card – that I was grappling with. The Invisible World. How do you show the invisible? How do you depict a parallel dimension apprehended by some other means than vision? Shamans and prophets, patients emerging from comas and survivors of near death experiences all attest to this non-material plane of existence. Then there's the whole realm of the imagination. Whatever we envision first arises from the invisible.
I left the three photos out on a table, pondering them in my peripheral vision as I went about my day. An image came to me of a night sky, radiating outward from the face. She free falls through it, trusting the unseen, the unknown. The text on the back of the card reads: Trust your other-than five senses . . . collaborate with mystery . . .
We are doing just that in creating this whole deck.
The Amazon woman in the photo had a certain twinkle in her eye. Her quizzical, childlike gaze was full of mirth. She knows the invisible world, I thought. This gaze has something to teach us.
So the mysterious jungle woman took her place in the illustration, her face transformed into a mask, with pinwheeling space around her in gradients ranging from white to blue to black. How I love painting gradients! Give me a trio of colors to blend, a Beethoven piano sonata, some Spanish guitar or sweet violin, and I'm happy. When the blending was done, I chose a smaller brush and embedded the clay-colored face in the dark, careening space – she turns with it, emerges from it, relaxes into it. As if illustrating a concept of physics, I felt this simple architecture was sufficient to suggest something beyond. Its lines are unevenly spaced, irregular, organic – as if moving. Yielding to this irregularity is freeing. I allow myself to take chances in this project, risking small failures by breaking patterns – putting myself deliberately up against an edge, loosening control, trusting, following an intuited path. These small risks reflect ideas in the cards themselves. Here the unknown is symbolized by the unexpected spirals intersecting the emanations of dark and light. I didn't preplan that. They also mirror the small spirals in the woman's cheeks. What is exterior to her is also within her.
Bit by bit, the woman's face harmonized with its surroundings, and a sense of balance emerged between subject and background.
None of this would have happened had Daven not made her suggestion about the photos. That she left it up to me to decide which face to use was no accident. Sometimes she lets me take the lead, developing the images according to my own initiative. Other times she requests specific elements – a white rabbit in the snow, a woman howling like a wolf. Either way, it works. Ten months into this collaboration, we've learned to trust each other – and the project itself, which has truly taken on a life of its own . . . a life guided by a feminine sort of power, a felt sense, a shared value. And a lot of volleying of ideas back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean.
Grateful am I, for all of it.
You can support this project and pledge to preorder The Power of the Yin Oracle Deck on Kickstarter here, and watch a video of this illustration being painted here.
A good week to all!
D Yael Bernhard
http://dyaelbernhard.com
children's books • fine art • illustration