Image of the Week: View From Yemin Moshe, Jerusalem
© D. Yael Bernhard
It was in July of 2011 that I first visited Yemin Moshe, a picturesque neighborhood in Jerusalem just outside the Old City walls. Exploring the quaint alleyways of white Jerusalem stone, I felt like I was walking in a painting. With its lovely staircases, arches, flowering gardens, and lack of motor vehicles, no wonder Yemin Moshe has become an artists' colony.
This was not always the case. Yemin Moshe was the first residential neighborhood built outside the Old City – a dangerous place in the 1890s, when thieves and marauders roamed the unkempt land of what was then part of the Ottoman Empire. Life outside the city walls was dangerous, yet life inside was unsanitary and crowded, prompting British banker and philanthropist Moses (Moshe) Montefiore to build the new neighborhood that was named after him. In its early years, he had to pay people to live there.
Yemin Moshe affords a lovely view of Jerusalem's Old City and its hilly environs, including this massive mosque that rises from a patchwork of olive and cypress trees. I took a photo, knowing I would want to paint a future landscape. I wish I could have done the painting on the spot! But I absorbed the feeling of the place, with its stone angles and curves interspersed with trees, its clear Mediterranean light and expanded sense of time. Time takes on a different quality in Israel. Here in North America, we do not have architecture dating back more than two or three centuries, but Jerusalem stone – a form of limestone that's known to harden with age – can last for millennia. This white stone is ubiquitous throughout Jerusalem in ancient and modern buildings alike, and takes on subtle patinas of color in different weather and light – a wonderfully challenging subject for artists. Here I tackled it from a distance, but in some of my paintings such as this one and this one, I've done close-up portraits of individual blocks of stone, each with its own time-worn character.
If tended and pruned by human hands, the olive trees nestled among these buildings may also survive for well over a thousand years, and continue to produce olives. The twelve years it took me to finish this painting are only a scratch compared to the span of time that unfolded before my eyes that day. The upheaval and events in the news since then seem like a mere blip compared to the history of Jerusalem. I thought about this as I painted, grateful that my mind is free to ponder while my hands are busy mixing and applying colors. It's a lot to absorb. Each time I've traveled to Israel, it takes months or years for the impressions I bring home to trickle down in my mind . . . and into my artwork.
"View From Yemin Moshe" is the image for March 2024 in my new calendar, The Jewish Eye 5784/2024 Calendar of Art – available in my webstore ($20 with shipping included) or on Amazon ($16.95). The original painting is for sale. Please inquire for more information if you're interested.
You can view the entire calendar here.
A good week to all!
D Yael Bernhard
children's books • fine art • illustration
