In the Midst of the Garden
The series of paintings which Carole Berman is showing in her present exhibition – In the Midst of the Garden and How Are the Mighty Fallen – are the best works she has yet made. My visits to the artist’s studio this winter have been a moving and exciting experience: one after another, Carole has produced paintings fired by new resolution and power. Like all Carole’s works, they draw on the rich sources of her imagination and her dreams. But the private and hermetic aspects of her earlier paintings have been replaced by a confident public voice that lifts her work into the mainstream of European painting.
Carole Berman’s new perspective comes after a period spent away, living in Jerusalem, which nourished her sense of her Jewish roots. This was accomplished partly through her study of Hebrew Jewish mystical texts. But it involved a vivid, sensual awareness of the living presence of biblical history in the very light and air of the ancient city. From Carole’s studio, in a remote corner close to the city walls, she looked out at the landscape, imagining that she saw Hebrew texts written into the crevices of the rocky terrain. On one occasion, she scrambled over an ancient wall to find herself alone in the magical silence of the olive groves of Ein Kerem, where John the Baptist was born.
This experience, alongside the artist’s vivid dreams, inspired In the Midst of the Garden. Not long after her return to London, Carole had a dream about fallen oak trees writhing on the ground like suffering, bleeding bodies. As she began to work on a large-scale painting, exorcising her dream, she recalled David’s lament over the slaying of Jonathan and Saul in the biblical poem, ‘How Are the Mighty Fallen’ (Samuel 2, chapter 1, verses 19-27). In this first painting, the dense orange-brown pigment, like the fire lapping around the fallen trees, is broken by slashes of sunlit blue sky.
This alchemical mixture of earth, fire and air gave rise to the vision of the silver-green olive tree that springs up in the centre of In the Midst of the Garden. It is a particularly beautiful painting, conjured, it would seem, from little more than translucent veils of liquid light and air. To the left, we see memories of the writhing oaks transforming into olive trees. Like many of Carole Berman’s earlier figure paintings, this recalls the artist’s fascination with the mystical image of the Tree of Life. The title, once again, has a biblical source, referring in this instance to Eve’s reply to the serpent’s taunt: ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden . . . But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall yet touch it, lest ye die’ (Genesis Chapter 3, verses 2-3).
Carole Berman has often sought equivalents in the myths and legends of ancient religious cultures for the mysteries which inhabit her psyche and surface on an unconscious level in her dreams. This inspired the highly personal, visionary style of her early work, which reflected her travels in India and Nepal and her sympathy with a tradition of idiosyncratic, visionary artists that includes Frida Kahlo and Francesco Clemente. Carole has often talked to me about the blindingly intense relationship between her dreams, her experiences and her art. Only recently, since her return from Jerusalem, does she feel able to incorporate a sense of emotional perspective and reflection into her work.
There is no doubt that this is giving rise to her strongest and most persuasive paintings. The themes – life and death, male and female, matter and spirit, and how we attempt to reconcile the tragic polarities of human existence through art – remain the same. What has changed is Carole’s exciting use of texture (sand and marble dust) and text, which she weaves like a thread into the tapestry of her paintings. As figures become less prominent, the illustrative aspect of her work has given way to a poetic evocation of the biblical text. Contemplating this work, the artists that come to mind are no longer outsiders, but rather the major figures of contemporary European painting like Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. In Britain it is rare to find painting which reflects on history and myth. Carole Berman’s resonant new work not only does this, it also evokes the transformative processes which are the very essence of creation.
Jill Lloyd
Central to Carole Berman’s visionary art is the powerful symbol of the Tree of Life. This generative source, whether we conceive of it as a neurological tree, as the embodiment of Adam Kadmon, or as the ascendent-descendent module of the creative flowchart, is deeply rooted in this artist’s imagination.
Trees are now an endangered species, and Carole Berman’s sacralization of them in her new series of paintings helps restore the tree to the mythic plane it occupies in consciousness. ‘What is above is below’ we learn from the alchemical art, and trees both in their skybound aspirations and in their extraordinary physical rootedness perfectly fulfil this criterion. They are the natural vehicle in Kabbalistic thought to bringing about a unification of the macrocosm and microcosm. Berman’s affinity with trees, both in their real and symbolic forms of representation, allows her vision to see the opaque bark as transparent. Through the transformative powers of imagination, she laser-cuts a way to the interior and discovers there that the tree’s drive-unit of sap is in the process of fertilising souls about to be incarnated.
The analogies between Carole Berman’s vision of the Tree of Life and the anonymous 14th century plate accompanying the alchemical treatise written by Aeyrenaeus Philalethes are hardly accidental. Carole’s windowing of this prevalent archetype, with all of its celebratory phallocentric dynamism, is remarkable for the affirmative pointer it offers to the timeliness of imaginative reality. According to Philalethes: ‘From death comes new life. While the body remains below, the volatile part rises, just as the human soul and spirit leave the body when death releases them.’
The epic scale of Carole Berman’s canvases permits the viewer to literally step into the painting. ‘Eternity’, Blake wrote, ‘is in love with the productions of time.’ Blake’s thought, like Carole’s paintings, suggests that the two states are interchangeable. The artist works in time, but is responsive to vision. The idea is contained within the celebratory nature of Berman’s Tree of Life painting in which individual faces rather than leaves demand our attention. We could say that eternity is looking in at the artist creating in time.
The courage needed to embody the visionary states out of which Berman works implies that descent into the imaginal underworld is the first stage of the journey. Out of descent comes ascent. In this painting the figure of Adam Kadmon, dead, dreaming, or in a state of trance, has given birth to generative matter. He is himself depicted as a fallen tree, a body laid horizontal on the earth. It is arguably Adam’s psychic ejaculation, the equivalent of a tree’s fertilising sap, that is responsible here for the concretization of his vision.
‘Tree of Life’ is one in a new series of paintings that are staggering not only in scale, but in terms of their visionary content. Works like ‘Tree of Good and Evil’, ‘How are the Mighty Fallen’ and ‘In the Midst of the Garden’ all pursue themes in which the Tree of Life is central to a mystico-alchemical vision. Sourced by the artist’s rich inner relations with poetry, myth and a deepening awareness of Kabbalistic thought, Berman has created her own tree-myths. If we conceive of the spinal column as the instrument responsible for conducting the flow of subtle energies as they interact with the chakras, then we can see in this vision of the Tree of Life a holographic representation of inner and outer realities.
Within the context of Berman’s tree-myths we encounter the concept of androgynous consciousness. The bisexualized trunk that features in the painting ‘How are the Mighty Fallen’ professes a wound preparatory to the integration of male and female in one body. The tree is observed as bleeding. In alchemy as in the Tao doctrine of Yin Yang, each opposing principle contains its opposite. Self-realisation is achieved by the reconciliation of opposites within the modality of individual consciousness. All of Berman’s paintings to date have on some level affirmed this unifying principle.
Adam Kadmon’s material body is composed of the same mineral and carbon-based substances as earth. In this painting he comprises the matrix out of which all life grows: he is earth-coloured, tree-textured, and his anatomy supports the interchange between higher and lower states of existence. All the potentialities are contained within his organism, and in Berman’s vision Adam’s cellular structure finds its external counterpart in the expectant life-forms waiting with anticipation for entry into the world. There is a mystery attached to each of the faces looking out of the tree. Are these people the artist has known in the past or will know in the future? Or are they the vision of the world-soul embodied through Adam’s projection of that cosmological archetype?
Carole Berman’s art is one of elevating the real into the mythic and the mythic into the marvellous. Compact within the artist’s imagination is the idea of the mysterium coniunctionis, the marriage in which consciousness and the unconscious are reconciled. Her Tree of Life provides a ladder that we can climb in order to share her vision.
If seeing is knowing, then visionary seeing takes the process a stage nearer completion. Carole’s paintings give expression to a world I recognize as truth. They affirm beauty as an ideal, and imagination as a reality. They impart a holistic vision to a universe in which man and nature are interdependent. ‘Where man is not, nature is barren,’ Blake wrote. Carole Berman’s art supplies the reconciliation of the two in ways that are a continuous celebration of the archetypal characterization common to both. Her work is a triumph of poetic feeling.
Jeremy Reed