Image of the Week: View From Overlook Mountain
© Durga Yael Bernhard
I just finished this painting this morning. It's oil on canvas, 28" wide. I've been working on it for about ten days, getting ready for my forthcoming solo landscape painting show at the Catskill Watershed Corporation in Margaretville, NY. To be titled "Eye on the Mountains", the show will open on November 2nd. More about that to come.
Overlook Mountain is one of my favorite hikes. I make the trek up to the fire tower at least four times a year. This particular photo was taken in late May, when the valleys were fully green, but the tops of the mountains still blushed with a hint of spring color. I love this view of Indian Head Mountain to the north – though even with my artist's eye, I find it hard to see that wavy ridge as a human profile. Is that a stubborn chin all the way to the right?
This was a difficult painting in the sense that I struggled to wean myself from the source – that is, the photograph I was working from. A point comes in every painting when I no longer need to look at the external source (if there is one), and can interpret the image simply in its own terms – as a composition in color, shape, and tone that needs to be brought into harmony with itself. The creation takes on a life of its own – which, like a teenager trying to grow up and leave home, is both liberating and scary. But it's worth traveling this shaky ground, for this is what renders a painting original – a fusion of both vision and source. Without that, all you have is a dry rendering of a photograph.
But this painting was an exception in that I couldn't wean myself from the source until the very end. Until the last fifteen minutes, I simply could not stop looking at the photograph. There was just too much detail, too much variation of texture and color. And yet somehow, my vision of this place and the lushness of those familiar mountains for which I have so much affection came through.
Which just goes to show that every painting has its own unique set of laws – and that is what the artist must follow. I learned that from Henri Matisse, one of my lifelong mentors, long ago. He obeyed all the rules, from the conventional to the uncanny – but for every painting he did, he first had to discover them.
D Yael Bernhard