COMMUNITY COMMENT

MORRIS BERD
American
Boy with Bird
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mr. Harold Kaye
1952.25

Antonio Farias is the Director of Diversity Affairs at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy.

Boy with Bird, by Morris Berd, resonated on many levels when I first viewed it, not the least of which was the beautifully aged wood frame, a frame that seemed to absorb the bleeding colors of the painting. I would almost expect to come back to the gallery and see the painting’s colors begin to bleed onto the walls, eventually swallowing up the entire gallery space. That is, after all, what jungles do, they devour the living and the dead – and if you’ve ever been lost in the jungle, you’d understand that it devours the souls of men as well.

As an American who is proud of his Ecuadorian roots, the painting triggered old memories from childhood, living with my family in a secluded fishing village one mile south of the equatorial line, sandwiched between the expansive Pacific on one side and the ever present terror of the jungle on the other. As a Latino, I have to look twice as hard for validation of my experience in the world while living in the northern part of the Americas, something that changes when I travel into the lower Americas, where the colors have not yet matured onto the artist’s palette but surround you as you walk through everyday life, everyday space. Berd apparently sought out the natural in the world, escaping the grays of the city for the colorscape and density of the country, and it’s that sense of infinite space held at bay by the hope of a young child and what to me looks like a sea-faring bird, that makes the painting warm and inviting. In Ecuador, birds, particularly Condors, are the mediums of the spirit world, the great spirits residing in the snowcaps of the Andes as well as the fertile, bestial jungles of the coastal plains. I too have escaped the city, and still yearn for the solitude, and like Berd, have had my fill of the density of jungles both urban and wild, and long for a simpler promise of vast open space and minimal variation – for him it was the Amish country, for me it’s the uniformly sazon colored deserts of the southwest.