Image of the Week: Untitled Path
© D. Yael Bernhard
Here's a small painting I did in 2004, purely for my own personal expression. The paper is handmade and has a toothy grain to it that I love. I had only one precious piece, and wanted to make good of it. I decided to create an image of the creative process itself.
A favorite passage from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainier Maria Rilke came to mind. In my teenage years this diminutive paperback was like a bible to me. I studied that book and highlighted everything I hoped to internalize. One particular paragraph has stayed with me all my life:
"Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarify: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating."
These letters from Rilke to a budding and troubled poet were written from 1903 to 1908, in a time when the unconscious itself was a newly-emerging concept of modern psychology. Seventy years later, I was equally full of angst in my creative yearnings as the young recipient of these missives. Brimming with timeless truths and poignant turns of phrase, Rilke's advice was both thought-provoking and comforting. Little did he know his words would reach across more than half a century to help a budding hippie artist find a bridge between nature and art. His metaphor of gestation couldn't be more apt, for my unconscious was pregnant with my twin desires to express myself visually and to bear children – to bring forth creation in both art and life.
The pregnant figure here is both empty and full – clearly bulging with whatever unseen growth is swelling inside her, yet her belly is nothing but bare, exposed paper – the most featureless part of the painting, like an empty vessel that is full of unrealized potential. She is both defined and intersected by a curvilinear boundary that moves like a calligraphic snake, holding her belly but passing through her head. This line also changes the background pattern it passes through. The non-repeating pattern could be interpreted as the fabric of my unconscious, for I constantly see these interlocking, organic shapes in my mind's eye. If ever I lack for inspiration, I just start articulating these cubist quilts that seem to arise naturally from my paintbrush. The earthy color relationships here are among my favorites.
Anything I paint purely for fun is open game for breaking rules. As a professional illustrator, I'm often bound to the needs of my clients and viewers. Here was an opportunity to play – to create an interplay of figure, pattern, and line, all on a deliciously textured surface. I let the line meander as it wished, with no particular logic in mind. Is that what I was unconsciously striving for – to express the instinctual knowing that is "beyond the reach of one's own intelligence?"
This primal impulse became popularized in a whole movement in European art called automatism that briefly flourished in the 1920s. Like abstract expressionism, automatism held that art doesn't have to be justified or explained. The path this painting took was unknown even to me. Like an unanswered question, the original hangs unframed on my bedroom wall along with about two dozen other small works on paper. The organic, interlocking shapes satisfy my eye like a good meal satisfies my belly. The line that dares to cut through the figure coils out of that "inexpressible germ of a feeling," like the tiny rootlets that emerge from the seeds I plant in little indoor pots at this time of year.
On any given day, I have numerous paintings gestating inside me. Rilke was right. For me, the process of silent, inner gestation and then bringing forth is well-established after all these years. The fields and forms of creation continue to swell and yield in response to each other – nothing more and nothing less than the visual expressions of a probing mind.
A good week to all –
D Yael Bernhard