Talks & Conversations

The Art of Looking: María Berrío, A Sunburst Restrained

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María Berrío, A Sunburst Restrained, 2019, collage with Japanese paper and watercolor on canvas, Gift of Erika and John Toussaint, 2020.2.1

María Berrío’s A Sunburst Restrained is the inspiration for this interactive conversation. Join us for a one-hour virtual session and share your observations, interpretations, questions, and ideas about this work of art.

These conversations will encourage you to engage deeply with art, with others, and with the world around you as you hone skills in visual literacy and perspective-taking.    

The program is free, open to the public, and is designed for everyone interested in talking about art. No art or art history background is required. Ages 18 and over. 

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We look slightly down onto a crush of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, wagons, and streetcars enclosed by a row of densely spaced buildings and skyscrapers opposite us in this horizontal painting. The street in front of us is alive with action but the overall color palette is subdued with burgundy red, grays, and black, punctuated by bright spots of harvest yellow, shamrock green, apple red, and white. Most of the people wear long dark coats and black hats but a few in particular draw the eye. For instance, in a patch of sunlight in the lower right corner, three women wearing light blue, scarlet-red, or emerald-green dresses stand out from the crowd. The sunlight also highlights a white spot on the ground, probably snow, amid the crowd to our right. Beyond the band of people in the street close to us, more people fill in the space around carriages, wagons, and trolleys, and a large horse-drawn cart piled with large yellow blocks, perhaps hay, at the center of the composition. A little in the distance to our left, a few bare trees stand around a patch of white ground. Beyond that, in the top half of the painting, city buildings are blocked in with rectangles of muted red, gray, and tan. Shorter buildings, about six to ten stories high, cluster in front of the taller buildings that reach off the top edge of the painting. The band of skyscrapers is broken only by a gray patch of sky visible in a gap between the buildings to our right of center, along the top of the canvas. White smoke rises from a few chimneys and billboards and advertisements are painted onto the fronts of some of the buildings. The paint is loosely applied, so many of the people and objects are created with only a few swipes of the brush, which makes many of the details indistinct. The artist signed the work with pine-green paint near the lower left corner: “Geo Bellows.”

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Facing away from us, a young woman with pale skin, wearing a golden yellow gown, leans her head down toward the lute she holds nearly upright in her lap in this horizontal painting. She sits near the right edge of the painting so her body faces the table beyond her, to our left. Her body is angled away from us but she turns her head so we see her in profile, facing our left. She tips her head to put her ear next to the lute, and she looks down and off to our left with brown eyes under thin, slightly arched brows. She has a straight nose, smooth, flushed cheeks, and her coral-pink lips are closed. Her dark blond hair is parted down the middle and pulled back under long braids looped around the back and over the top of her head. Light reflects off her hair and off the short, loose strands near the ear we can see. Her long yellow dress has a full skirt. The stiff bodice is laced up the sides and hooks over the shoulders, over a voluminous, bright white blouse. The sleeve we can see is pushed up over her forearm. Her seat is draped in crimson-red, velvety fabric. She holds the neck of the lute up high with her left hand, her fingers pressing the strings, so she brings the rounded body of the instrument up to her ear. In front of her, the table is draped with fringed, olive-green fabric. A violin made with blond wood lies on the table with the neck stretching toward us. There is also the violin bow and at least three wooden recorders on the table. One book of music is open so the pages fall over the edge of the table, near the woman. One other book of music at the back of the table is held open with a recorder. The feet of the table and the ankles of the woman are cut off by the bottom edge of the painting. The background is dark, earth brown except for a diagonal shaft of light across the top left corner of the composition, presumably from a high window in the wall out of our view.

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