On a ranch in the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil, near the small town of Joinville, where Vero Murphy lived, she witnessed the owner making a homemade food ritual to attract birds. In a peach tree, he inserted a feast of open fruits for the birds: bananas, oranges, juicy pieces of “mamão” or papaya. “The tree —symbol of the connection between what is under the earth and the vast sky— receives Them; the man is the one who ‘prepares the table’ for the animals and, as soon as it is served, the diners arrive to the celebration: blue, green, yellow birds have come to feed and in a matter of minutes the succulent banquet will disappear,”Murphy relates. What the camera depicts, and then she paints, evokes not only Gauguin’s Polynesian blues, but the symbiotic force between the plant, animal and human kingdoms. The simple rite that is photographed and pictorially represented catches the eye because it contains the memory of the domestication of trees and plants, and of the small creatures whose behavior we have transformed since ancient times. There is no innovative pretension in these paintings from the seriesentitled, in Portuguese, Recanto dos pássaros (Birds’ Corner, 2013), perhaps because what they represent is simply the way in which, almost since the beginnings of humanity, we have been linked to the other kingdoms. Each painting in her series is a celebration of the feast that the planet —the “nest” of all the beings that share it provides us. And here, the act of painting is synonymous with gratitude. Vero Murphy bears witness in a distant rural town to what is forever beautiful.

By Adriana Herrera Téllez PhD