Bernard C Winter Art

In this series I am not trying to illustrate the text of the psalms, as such, but to reach a place in an inner landscape, a state of being.  The artwork in the end is the accumulated work upon a meditation upon a specific text and I hope that the text will be felt when viewing the art work.  My desire to create visual meditations on the psalms springs from the desire to make the inner life visible.   The psalms are the most personal pages of the Bible, and wrestle with our most fundamental emotions – anger, fear, loneliness, grief, calm acceptance, praise and joy. They speak of our fundamental needs - ‘help me’ – ‘I need you’ – to be found in a desire for a relationship with the Divine. The psalm’s structure of call and response, and of repetition rather than rhyme, has a visual equivalent in patterning. The verses, which were meant to be sung to musical accompaniment, read like lyrics, poems, love letters – and sometimes like a desperately scribbled note thrown in to a bottle and dropped into the ocean.  Yet by the end of each psalm, the author has received the answer to his message, and the order of the universe is upheld.

READ MORE ABOUT THE PSALM SERIES IN BERNARD'S BLOG

A review of this artwork by noted author Rick Hamlin can be found on the Guideposts.org website. Please follow this link :

Rick Hamlin: What Do you See When You Pray?

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My video slideshow of this series can be played here:

Psalm 90 A Song of Moses

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This psalm is unique in that it is the only one attributed to Moses.

It is also an astounding, monumental meditation upon time itself, our mortality, and the eternity that is God.

The psalmist is like a person who is trying to describe the vastness of space but fails, and by way of comparison can only describe his own smallness. . .

READ MORE ABOUT THIS PSALM ON THE BLOG PAGE

http://www.bernardcwinterart.com/new-blog

This is a project that is intended to honor the women of my church community, The United Palace House of Inspiration (UPHI) located at 175th street and Broadway in Upper Manhattan. The church was known for many years as the United Palace Cathedral, founded by Reverend Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, better known as Reverend Ike. After his passing in 2009, his son Xavier has re-envisioned the church and is rebuilding the congregation. He is supported in his work by the many congregation members who were active during his father’s ministry. The majority of the congregation membership is made up of women. There is a strong association of seniors who call themselves “The Golden Youth Ministry.” Many of the senior women dress for church services in costumes and hats that are extraordinary in their beauty and finery. I think this is what first attracted me to the idea of this project – that these seniors consider themselves to be elegant, beautiful, important and vital – and dress the part to express their inner richness!

While drawing the portraits of these women, I  engaged them in conversation. I had a tape recorder going to record the conversations, and type transcripts later. As part of my research, I asked each participant what they consider a strong woman to be, how from their perspective what gifts a strong woman has that may be different from a strong man, and what role models in their lives have been strong women. In addition to recording the conversation, I took photos to be used as references to complete the final painting at my home studio. The process of drawing and recording follows a method I developed in painting the portraits of seniors at the Isabella Geriatric Center in 2010, with much success. 

New York City is where I have made my home since 1980  in the Washington Heights area.  We are closer to nature here than anywhere else in Manhattan; the land itself narrows down to a coastline, there is the beautiful cliffs of the Palisades facing us from new Jersey, and powerful bridges such as the George Washington and the Henry Hudson span the Hudson and the Spyten Duvyil.  The park at Fort Tryon has been a respite for me for decades. It is a quiet joy to spend the day in nature, painting, observing changes, and being with the landscape. I begin to reckon time not by the clock but by the angle of the sun and the length of shadows on the ground. These paintings recall to me the hours I spent in quiet contemplation; I can recall each day, the weather and what it felt like to be out there amongst the trees, wind and river. 

the hand series was the very first of contemplative drawings I made, in which the subject is an object of meditation upon a theme. These hands are my left head, and they hold images of growth and fecundity. All of these pencil drawings dates form 1997. I am planning a return to the hand series in which I will draw hands in the Indian mudras. hands are always, for me, indicative of the person's inner state of being. I was careful to include the hands of the sitters in the Isabela series and in the Perndle Hill series. 

The energy series was created in  2014. This series is a growth from my ten -minute drawing series I began in 2013, but on a much larger scale. The series is about primordial energy, the energy of creation, of the life force that is manifesting and coming into being. In a sense this series is related to the Psalm series, in that I am drawing the dialog between God and human, between heaven and earth. That accounts for the vertical orientation. Energy of creation is coming down in the plane of physicality and being made manifest. Anything more than that I wouldn't know how to describe. The whole work is improvisational, done in the moment, using my left hand, my right hand, and turning and reorienting the rectangle so that I am working on the image from all directions.  If an image becomes too 'set' too soon, I scrape down the work to reopen the passages - to keep the work in the realm of potentiality for as long as possible. Just like when you scramble eggs there is a point when the fluidity becomes solid; I am trying to keep the process as fluid as possible and extend that moment. The serpentine, flame like shapes have always been with me, in all of my drawings, and frequently have swirled around my portraits as an aura of energy.

Additionally, I have become fascinated with the serpentine turns in the Hebrew alphabet and its calligraphy. In Lawrence Kushner's excellent "The Book of Letters" he describes the letters as holy 'vessels carrying within the light of the Boundless One' and that the letters themselves were present at the Creation, and were the  building blocks of heaven and earth. While I am not attempting to draw the letters, the energy series makes use of the serpentine shapes as 'prototype' letters that are coming into being.

The serpentine turn has an additional connotation of the seed image, of planting, sprouting and growth. The seed is also the moment of conception, the immaterial becoming manifest.

All of these paintings have been painted in the balcony of the church I am attending, during the noon service. The Church is called UPHI - "United Palace House of Inspiration" located at 175th street and Broadway in Manhattan. I approached Bishop Xavier Eikerenkoetter about painting during the service. I was inspired by the electric energy of the Gospel choir and band, as well as the Bishop's many sermons and meditations on the power of transformation and transformative energy. During the meditations, visual images of time lapse photography - of flowers opening and closing, of trees coming into leaf, of ice and snow melting and even the galaxies swirling - fillthe large movie screen and those images also  inspire me and I have worked with them. The resulting images I am creating have all of these influences.  I would like to thank to thank Bishop Xavier for giving the opportunity to express myself, and what's more -  worship the Almighty - through the act of painting.

All art making has its own spiritual component. An art work does not need to have an explicitly spiritual image to be spiritual.  However, due to the confinement of words and their limitations - I don't know what else to call this category! These paintings and drawings include some very early work from 1997 - 1999 when I resumed painting after a seven year lay off. 

The drawing of the willow tree in "Te Deum Laudamus'" is an early effort to combine an image with an inherent spiritual content. I sat under the tree for three days looking up, following the branches and the energy of the bark towards the leaf tips.  I preplanned the border with the inscription, which I added to finish the work. I consider this drawing the beginning of my mature work. 

The drawing "Sing"  from the following year was created as a gift for my future wife, Sandra. She had told me a dream she had as a child that an angel came to her, touched her on the throat and told her to sing. So I drew that image, which came out in one eight hour session and was done. A true love offering!

"Heart's Compass"  is a work that was begun in 2001 and became water damaged after an apartment fire in 2003. In 2006, I brought this work to Pendle Hill during an artist's sojourn and reworked it, adding the color. the message of the work is simply that if one let's go of one's fears, then the heart knows its way to go. the heart is shown in the process of self- liberating as the chains are breaking off.

"Seek and Ye Shall Find"  was another work damaged in the apartment fire and reworked at Pendle Hill in 2006.  this work is the first time I combined oil pastel and acrylic ink together and I was surprised at how well the two can be combined so that one can redraw on top of thick oil pastels. Jesus' message is portrayed as opportunities everywhere that can be received and claimed if one takes action.

"The Job Tree"  makes reference to the Book of Job, in which God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind. I felt an enormous energy radiating from this tree, a very old mulberry tree found inFort Tryon in Manhattan . This mulberry had huge spiraling, twisting branches that went in all directions. I drew its portrait over a three day period and have photographed it from all angles. Sadly, this tree toppled over and was removed by the city some years ago , but when I visited its site to mourn its passing I found a piece of its bark, which I now have with me on a small altar space in my studio.

"Serene Mother"  is a portrait of my wife's nurturing energy. She is gathering to herself sunflowers which are her personal symbols of her own psychic energy. we enjoy having sunflowers in our house as they always seem so radiant and life affirming.

This series of portraits, begun in 2014, chronicles the men who are members of the UPHI Drum Council. Each member has consented to have his portrait drawn while drumming. There is a terrific sonic, vibrational energy generated by the men chanting and drumming together. This energy literally resonates into the bodies of the participants and it has been a fascinating challenge to capture their fierce energy and focus and to draw some of the more meditative moments of the Drum Council.

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The project involved creating a collaboration with a neighborhood nursing home, Isabella Geriatric Center. Over the course of the year  in 2010 and through multiple visits with the residents I interviewed, photographed and drew the residents.  The drawings lead to portraits in color. The population I worked with was between 95 and 105 years old. the project culminated in an exhibition of the portraits and transcript summaries of the interviews in the fall of 2010 at Isabella.

The medium I used for these portraits, gouache, is watercolor with the addition of white paint. The paints can be applied transparently, or opaquely, and I often combined both transparent and opaque paint in one work. I also unified the appearance of my drawings and my paintings, which have felt like they were coming from two different artists at times. In these portraits, you can feel their origin as a drawing, and I redrew on top of my paintings, keeping that graphic, linear aspect. I didn’t try to pretty up the portraits of the residents; I stayed true to the photographs and to the pose, gestures and facial expressions. Yet my goal was to express their humanity in their present situation. Some were in physical pain; some were not cognizant of their surroundings. Yet each one of them is important because they are human beings, and the tenacity of their very long life is a remarkable achievement.

I consider myself first and foremost to be a portrait artist. It seems to be impossible to create an image, no matter what the subject, without it being portrait of that image. In that vein I created portraits of trees, and portrait of specific places in a specific time, rather then thinking of them as pure landscapes. Even when I drew an abstractions  which i titled the 10 minute drawing series, i asked myself "What am i drawing?" and the answer that came to me was I was drawing a portrait of that ten minutes. 

Here are a variety of portraits of people I have known throughout my life. Each person has a story behind their portrait that empowers the portrait.

  I am a painter who is concerned with portraiture as an expression of a person’s inner beauty, strength, and vitality.  I have been drawing portraits for over twenty years.  For me, drawing and painting are spiritual actions I take in the world.  The time it takes to draw someone promotes intimacy, in that the two of us must sit together and be together.  In this exchange, sometimes we talk, and I have found that I have been welcomed into a deeper centeredness whereby the pretenses of looking good fall away.  Hopefully, I arrive at a place whereby I can see the person rightly, and draw the sitter with loving eyes and with respect.  I have drawn the portraits of people who are homeless, who are sick, who are dying, and who are recovering from operations, the elderly and children.

In 2011 at Pendle Hill I used the same technique of drawing and interviewing I first employed with the seniors at Isabella. After a period of prayer and meditation together, I drew the sitter, and then after the drawing was completed we had a conversation that was recorded.  What I have learned from following this process to become sensitive to each person’s ‘unfolding’ before me, that is, how they react to being seen and being drawn- and for my part, learning when to talk, when to be silent, when to ask a question.   The receptivity  of the sitters at Pendle Hill invited me into a deep place where I could draw from the heart to the heart.

I always bring paints and travel sketchbooks when I travel; and enjoy creating one or paintings during each of my trips. The places I have visited range across the United States, from Alaska, to Texas, to Ohio to Florida. I also have a passion for the Adorondack mountains of upstate New York.  

As an art teacher for more then twenty five years in the New York public school system, I have been blessed to work with so many thousands of children. Their creativity, imagination, curiosity and desire to learn keeps the creation and exploration of art fresh for me. In fact, many of the children's projects have inspired my own series. Here on this page are examples of two dimensional design, paintings and drawings from my students over the years.