“Sun & Moon” © D. Yael Bernhard
This painting was created many years ago as a gift for my neighbors – dear friends who live up the road from me. I’ve shared many a meal with this couple, and spent countless hours playing African drums with them. It was our mutual interest in West African music and Eastern mysticism that originally brought us together decades ago, before I lived here. I was deeply inspired by Taosim at the time, which became the subject of long conversations, and naturally emerged in my art as I sought to express the changing forces of nature and duality in visual form. In this painting, I divided the field into two pairs of opposites: male and female, sun and moon. What could be more archetypal?
Color helps to express the meaning of these pairs. The husband of this couple is from Pakistan, and the wife is of European descent. The contrast between their skin colors adds that much more tension to the painting. Both are reaching for their elemental source, the masculine energy of the sun and the feminine energy of the moon – represented by warmer and cooler colors, respectively. The curvy shapes of the figures contrast this geometric landscape, imparting a feeling of motion in their gestures.
The surface of the painting is a handmade collage of textured rice paper, pasted down in strips – a technique I’ve used many times since. I believe this was my first painted rice paper collage. It’s hard to explain how different it is to paint on a striped and textured surface, rather than a neutral one. Starting with a complex ground yields unexpected results. The stripes beg to be divided into sections, forming an irregular patchwork. Each part then wants to form a relationship with its neighbors, not just by juxtaposition but also with blends of color on top that knit them together. Even if the original surface is covered up, the underlying one completely shapes the outcome, evoking a response that would never happen otherwise. It’s like doing yoga on an uneven boulder beach (which I’ve done), or playing tennis on a rocking ship at sea (which I’ve never done, but can imagine).
I love this adventure! It enables me to use all my cherished scraps of rice paper and little strips of birchbark that I’ve saved over the years. Decades ago I used to print etchings and linoleum block prints on colored and textured rice papers, and kept the leftover pieces. The birchbark is gathered while hiking and foraging.
I’m working on another painted collage now – this time using the background fields of color as a symbol of space, and the painted line that cuts through them as a symbol of the passage of time. Time is a meandering line that travels inward to arrive at a central point, where it interacts with another line as a confluence of events. My challenge is to bring these imaginary dynamics alive in an engaging and harmonious way.
It’s a relaxing sort of challenge. Piecing collages together is – well, peaceful. One of these days I’m going to try painting the pieces first and then assemble the collage. That will change the entire picture – hopefully for the better.
A good week to all –
D Yael Bernhard
http://dyaelbernhard.com
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