Narkiss Street

© D. Yael Bernhard

Here’s a cityscape that I painted in Jerusalem in 2011, from the balcony of an apartment in a lovely residential neighborhood known as Rechavia. The building you see across the street is part of a Christian monastery, with typical architecture of Jerusalem stone and a clay tile roof. This white limestone is seen everywhere in Israel, both as bare rock, rough and baking under the Mediterranean sun, and as machine-hewn blocks used for building. Jerusalem stone actually hardens with exposure to the elements, and is largely why history is so well preserved in this part of the world. Older blocks age with time into subtle patinas of pastel hues, while younger buildings – like the one on the right, probably dating back a mere 50 years – are whiter. It was this contrast between the old and the new that inspired me to paint this scene. Modern buildings in Israel tend to have curved surfaces, partly due to the influence of Bauhaus architecture that was popular in Israel’s fledgling years during the 1950s and 60s; while older buildings were constructed in a more classical style typical of pre-war Europe.

The flowers in the foreground have a story, too. On the corner near our apartment building, a little indent was built into the wall that lined the sidewalk, with an olive tree and a curved bench, which we nicknamed “the giving corner.” Rain was so seldom during the dry summer season, that this corner became an outdoor free store. People left things to give away there – babies’ clothes, shoes, boxes of food, a few books and cosmetics. Before the Sabbath, the gifts would double, and it was there we found these lovely bundles of carnations and unidentified white flowers – for it is traditional to invite the mythical Shechinah to the Sabbath table with the most beautiful adornments. I brought the flowers home and added them to my painting, which became a combination of both landscape and still life.

Working on the painting, my ears were filled with the sounds of the city – birds, always some type of Middle Eastern pigeon cooing in the bushes; and people conversing in Hebrew on the sidewalk below. With my rudimentary grasp of the language, I strained to understand the chatter and make my painting session into a Hebrew comprehension lesson. Later, two people walked by speaking French, and not long after came passing snippets of British-accented English. I wondered if I could somehow integrate these sounds into my painting, or at least the feeling of the clear, cool air of an ordinary afternoon in this ancient city, on this quiet residential street named after a commander of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the 1967 Six Day War. Apparently he went to high school in the neighborhood.

In the end, the only clue of all this non-visual experience that I was able to incorporate into the painting was the breeze. Every late afternoon, the air begins to cool over the Judean Desert, which lies just east of the city, resulting in a refreshing breeze that cools Jerusalem down. But the movement in these bushes and trees is not just that of air – it is that of time itself. History is alive in Israel and always unfolding, not a relic of the past. To walk cobblestones that are 3000 years old is to experience oneself as very tiny indeed, a pinpoint on an arc of time that is almost too immense to grasp. For me it was both frightening and comforting. That’s Israel – a land of paradox, where the winds of time never cease to blow; where the past endures like solid blocks of stone, yet change never ceases to unfold.

My mind is free to think about these things as my hands mix colors and articulate shapes. Even that is a paradox, for it’s not always relaxing to ponder these concepts and struggle to integrate them into my art. Freedom comes with a price, and creativity can be either a blessing or a curse – gratifying or frustrating – a never-ending process that is fixed in time in an image. I’ll never forget that afternoon in Rechavia, anchored in acrylics on watercolor paper, even as it slipped away with the Jerusalem breeze, lost over the sands of the Judean Desert.

A good week to all –

D Yael Bernhard

http://dyaelbernhard.com

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