Image of the Week: View from Chatham
© Durga Yael Bernhard
Here's an unfinished landscape painting that I did thirty years ago from the back yard of a friend's house in Chatham, Massachusetts. If you're familiar with Cape Cod, you might recognize that narrow strip of sand in the distance as Nauset Beach. Some years after I painted this, the ocean broke across that strip, and it's now in pieces.
I came across this painting a few months ago while organizing my works on paper for the annual art studio tour. This is acrylic on paper, 30"x22". There are notes scribbled in pencil in the margin along the top: "more sky shows through trees . . . tufts of bark on trunks . . . ocean dark marine blue . . ." But thirty years have passed since my family and I stayed in this lovely place, and I can no more finish this from memory than I can do a portrait of my son, who was just a toddler on that trip and is now almost 31. I remember him crawling around on that slope of soft pine needles – a little piece of heaven.
We loved that spacious view! It was constantly changing. The dark, shapely trees in the foreground made a perfect frame for the distant ocean. I love the relationship between near and far. Most of my landscape paintings are views of something in the distance seen through objects close at hand – whether a window frame, trees, flowers, or even tall grass.
My art has evolved a great deal over the past three decades. Most notably, working as an illustrator has made my paintings much more precise and defined – like an incoming tide, it's an unstoppable trend that I'm constantly swimming against. I wish I could restore the naive looseness of this long-ago piece. I think I painted faster then, too.
But some things remain the same. Clearly I was painting with the great masters in mind who inspired me most: the Post-Impressionists, Cubists, Expressionists, and artists of the Russian avant garde are still are my greatest source of inspiration. Other influences cross-fertilize my conceptual images, but my landscape paintings are purely born of my love for painters such as Matisse, Cézanne, and Van Gogh. Sometimes I wonder: how did I end up in this century?
A good week to all!
D Yael Bernhard