Johannes Brahms’ German Requiem opens not with despair, but with consolation. It is a work that contemplates sorrow and beauty in equal measure. When painter Vanessa McKernan first visited the text, the beginning line stayed with her: “Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.” She imagined Brahms as an artist who, like herself, used his medium to reflect on the cycle of life and death.

That connection runs through McKernan’s oil painting As I Lay Sleeping, chosen by Toronto Mendelssohn Choir as the visual representation of its upcoming performances of Brahms: A German Requiem. The painting depicts a reclining figure surrounded by spectral companions, figures that hover between presence and memory. The scene feels suspended between dreaming and waking, mortality and imagination.

McKernan’s process, like her imagery, unfolds gradually. Her studio in the Ottawa Valley is central to that process. After moving from Toronto, she created a large, light-filled space where she can work on expansive canvases surrounded by nature. The quiet of the countryside, she says, provides room to think, to walk, and to transform her observations about the world and herself into something visual and wordless.

She begins each piece with drawings on paper, using watercolour, gouache, ink, oil pastels, to generate ideas before moving to oil paint on canvas, wood, or linen. The slow-drying quality of oil paint allows her to rework the composition over time. “What I edit or even destroy is as important as what I add,” she says. “I like to let the composition lead me in all different directions before I consider it finished.”

Over twenty years of painting, McKernan has developed a recurring visual lexicon—motifs that resurface across her work. The sleeping figure appears again and again, a symbol that allows her to explore mortality, memory, and the space between the physical and the spiritual. In As I Lay Sleeping, these ideas gather in a single moment of stillness, where the central figure seems both held and watched over by a quiet assembly of “blue women,” as McKernan calls them.

In them, she senses an echo of Brahms’ mourners: those who grieve, reflect, and bear witness to the continuity of life. “I feel a sort of comradery with him,” she says, “as artists who use our artform to think about the fundamental principle that underpins our humanity, which is our mortality.”