NAME: Bernard Friendlich
BIRTH PLACE: Bronx, New York
BIRTH DATE: 3.7.18
BIOGRAPHY
Discovering his talent in his early teens, Bernard's drawings were imaginative and his watercolors showed remarkable beauty. Graduating high school in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression, he was unable to find the resources to enable him to take advantage of an art scholarship to Long Island University. Instead, he found employment in several textile design studios. He proved so innovative that he became an originator, earning seventy-five dollars a week, a fabulous sum for his age and the times. After several years, at the age of twenty-one, he felt frustrated, ironically, by the growing demands for his designs since it meant working weekends at home, leaving no time or energy for the kind of art he desired to create.
Through family connections, he was persuaded to learn the skills of a marker-cutter in the men’s garment industry. With his keen eye and steady hand, he grasped the fundamentals quickly. However, the great inducement for him was the thirty-five hour work week, which was the union’s landmark achievement.
During WWII, he was drafted into the army and served in Europe from 1943 through 1946. Escaping several submarine attacks, his ship landed in England, where his company was barracked on a partially bombed-out royal estate. He became the regimental camofleur and photographer. Several of his watercolors depict England’s countryside as well as bombers over London. After the long-awaited invasion of France, he was shipped out where he was assigned to the combat engineers.
Wherever he went, he always carried with him a 6 X 9 pad and a small watercolor kit, painting impressions of the life around him. He estimates he produced almost one hundred paintings during that period of his life. The few that he sent home to his mother are in our possession today. Most were carefully packed into a duffle bag, which was stolen when his train was looted during a stopover in France. He once joked that if he took a trip through France today, he’d no doubt find some of his lost paintings in French pubs or homes.
Marrying shortly after returning home in 1946, fathering two daughters and working in a factory for thirty-five years, he found the time and energy to produce nearly 100 serious works of art during his lifetime. He is still at work daily in a variety of media—watercolor, oil, acrylic, woodburning, as well as sculptures in wood, stone, bronze and Duralux, a concrete-like material that he discovered in a construction supply house. All of his work reflects the concerns of our era and his highly-developed social conscience. They are a testament of the late twentieth century.
In 1996, as a relief from serious motifs and as a “fun thing to do,” he discovered a new medium which he could carve to let his imagination roam. Finishing a treat of mangos one day, he began studying the leftover pits and visualized beautiful exotic fish. For the next year, a fantastic variety of tropical fish emerged from that lowly kernel, which then evolved into full-scale dioramas, with animal and human heads and figures often serving as social commentary. There are more than fifty such pieces, to date. Mussel shells have similarly inspired rare specimens of butterflies.
His largest sculpture, weighing at least three hundred and fifty pounds, is called “Hiroshima, Theme and Variations,” and has been displayed to the public in commemoration of the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombings.
