Flying Crow Carrying Magnolia Flower

Flying Crow and Magnolia Flower

LILI BERNARD
Fine Artist
Celebrating Father God, Mother Nature & the Human Race

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"Flying Crow, Carrying Magnolia Flower"

Oil on Canvas 26 " x 22 "

Original & Gliceé Prints Available for Purchase

One sunny afternoon, I was driving my young sons down the hill from our home in Los Angeles, to their after-school swimming lessons. The boyz suddenly shouted out "Whoa!" as a very large black crow, carrying a giant white magnolia flower, glided across our minivan window shield. It flew so closely to the car, that I had to hit the brakes hard. Stopped in our vehicle in the middle of the street, we watched the bird land on the green grass of our neighbor's lawn. It just stood there and looked around, with the looming flower still in its beak. I pulled over to the side of the curb to see if the bird was going to drop his flower which seemed so heavy, yet which the crow carried with such ease. Still clutching the flower, the bird flew up to a tree and perched. It looked around some more. My sons and I watched in amazement as the crow took flight again and dutifully carried the imposing white flower back across our window shield into the oblivion from which it had suddenly appeared.

I thought immediately that it must be a sign and tried to decipher what it could possibly mean. I reflected upon the crows in the movie "Dumbo" that I had watched in the theatre as a child and remembered how they were characterized as scheming buffoonish negroes. Yet they were the impetus that Dumbo needed to lift his corpulent pachyderm body off the ground. I thought of my slave ancestors who carried such heavy white burdens on their dark shoulders upon which they lifted the Americas to greatness. I felt that my ancestors' spirits were speaking to me through this crow with his large white magnolia, poetically inspiring me to continue in my painting of their stories on canvas. I remembered Billy Holiday singing Lewis Allen's "Strange Fruit:"

"Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop."

I remembered an incident on bicycle, in my teenage years, when I feared that I was about to be lynched, after having returned biographies of Billie Holiday and Judy Garland that I had borrowed from our local library.

After my boyz and I witnessed that most amazing natural phenomenon of the crow, carrying his huge white magnolia flower across the sky; I never let a crow pass me by without taking a moment to appreciate the beauty of this very dark and powerful creature of flight, who is often overlooked or viewed as an imposing pest. I saw the crow as the unconquerable spirit of my slave ancestors who departed from their wretched lives on earth, taking with them to the heavens only sweetness, as fresh as the scent of Magnolias on the plantations upon which their backs were broken.

I use a symbol of a crow in flight, carrying a white magnolia flower, as the logo for a nonprofit I recently incorporated, entitled, ¡HABLA! Harvesting Asian, Black, Latino Artists.

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