It’s the last weekend of the year, and the last in our holiday weekend feature series highlighting the work of a single artist over the course of both days. Today (and tomorrow) we return to one of our favorite artists, some of whose work we featured here two weekends ago: Camille Bernal.
As you know if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, she’s Wings’s much-loved niece, now living in her late father’s home just down the road from us. It’s natural that we should carry her work, but I have to make one thing clear: We’d want to carry her work even if she were no relation at all. She’s that good.
Okay, she’s brilliant.
There aren’t many artists, particularly of the younger generation, who I am willing to describe with that particular word. It’s overused these days, much like “phenomenal” and a few others, and most of the time when I hear it, I hear echoes of Iñigo Montoya hard on its heels. More, brilliance in art is something that, in my experience, usually comes with experience, with an artist’s personal evolution over a long period of time, a life of hard work and mastery of craft and stripping and laying bare the vision in one’s soul. But once in a while, we come across an artist who manages it seemingly instinctively — who lives her art.
Today’s featured piece is one that she titled Flowers and Checkerboards. It drew me immediately, the boldness of the soft colors and delicate pattern. There are all sorts of directions for a po-mo art critic to go with this one. The obvious one combines the imagery of the sheer white paint over the deep red clay but unable to contain it, the new life arising from the checkerboarding like the flowers that yet bloom from the soil of our checkerboarded lands (and the spirit that yet lives in our checkerboarded souls).
It’s all there in the eyes of the viewer, and more, but what drew me initially was something more basic: It reminded me of home. I’ll get to why in a moment, but first I’ll let you read its description from our Other Artists: Pottery gallery:
Camille Bernal (Taos Pueblo) creates a masterwork that blends old traditional shapes with contemporary expressions. Checkerboard patterns in warm red ochre arise and criss-cross like ancient paths from the base of the pot, their lines growing organically into the stems of gently-blooming flowers. Flower groupings are tipped in alternating Santo Domingo White, Laguna Blue-Gray, and charcoal shades. Stands 5″ high by 5.25″ across at the widest point, with a 2-7/8″ opening across the lip (dimensions approximate). Other views shown above and below.
Tewa clay; plant-based paints
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
So what did I see when I first looked at this beautiful pot?
I saw a traditional first sign of spring where I come from: I saw catkins in the snow.
Catkins, of course, are the soft, fuzzy blooms found on pussy willows. They’re native to much of North America, including the Upper Midwest, where the winters are long, cold, dark, and deep. It is (or rather, was; climate change is disrupting the weather patterns there, too) customary to get snow from October through April, which means that the earth may be robed in a white blanket for half of the year. Toward the end of that period, people’s souls are psychically snow-blind, and they’re searching desperately for any hint of new plant life, any sign, however small, that warmer weather is on the way.
The catkins are that sign.
On a morning like this, when I awakened to a snow-blanketed world crystallizing beneath an actual temperature of five below zero, and a wind chill of nineteen below, it’s a reminder that the cold is all a part of circle and cycle, of the natural order things, of the way of being — and that as we journey around the circle, we’ll soon come to warmer days again.
Upon closer examination, of course, I saw all the other imagery in it that I described above. With my heritage and history, it speaks to my spirit in subtly powerful ways. But first and foremost, it speaks to me of home.
~ Aji
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