Rick Bartow Rules

[Ecurb]

I went to the opening of an exhibit at the Schnitzer (U. of Oregon) art museum featuring the work of Rick Bartow. Bartow is a native American artist from Newport, Oregon. The show was stunningly good. Bartow paints and sculpts with equal brilliance. His themes are often (but not always) Native American -- crow spirits and humans together, for example.

Here's a website about the exhibit -- the reproductions don't do justice to the art:

http://www.oregonlive.com/travel/ind...um_of_art.html

Here's a website that includes a picture of one of his sculptures:

http://www.iaia.edu/museum/vision-pr...s/rick-bartow/

If you google him you'll see more.

I went to the museum with some friends of mine who knew Bartow well -- from when they lived in Newport on the coast. The show was called, "Things You Know, but Cannot Explain" -- and all of the paintings and sculptures have names that demonstrate Bartow's literary talent -- just as the name of the show does. Of course I was wisecracking that my approach is different -- I concentrate on things I can explain, but don't know.

The exhibit opened with a touching Native American ceremony, complete with drums and chanting. My friends had some excellent Rick Bartow stories. When one was in Middle School in Newport, Rick Bartow was the janitor at the school. He was a Vietnam vet, already painting and he also played in a popular local band. Needless to say, the kids thought he was the coolest janitor of all time, and I'm sure they were right. He and his band -- Rick Bartow and the Backseat Drivers -- played at the Schnitzer opening. They were great -- despite the fact that Bartow has had a couple of strokes, and sometimes forgets the lyrics.

One of the paintings in the exhibit was a gripping abstract of a woman, with a skeleton coming up behind her and grabbing her breasts. Another of Bartow's friends told me that he had been married to one of the sweetest, kindest women, a cute blonde who worked in Health care and helped him kick alcohol. She was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 50 (or so), and died within a couple of weeks of the diagnosis. The story made the painting -- stunning in its own right - even more poignant.

Bartow is well known in Oregon. Have artsy types in the rest of America heard of him, Litnetters?

[stlukesguild]

I was going to suggest from the initial reproduction that his work appeared to be quite indebted to Michel Basquiat... but after looking at more reproductions and considering the dates of his works (as well as his Native American/West Coast background) I suspect he was more indebted to Nathan Oliveira...





and Fritz Scholder:





Like both Oliveira and Scholder, Bartow's paintings speak of influences of both the wild abandon and gestural brushwork of Abstract Expressionism (and the West-Coast California School of Figurative Painting) and the brilliant colors certainly build upon Pop Art:







I am also reminded of the very social-political minded artist/print-maker, Leonard Baskin... especially as a result of the Native American and Bird/Crow imagery:


-Leonard Baskin


-Leonard Baskin


-Leonard Baskin


-Rick Bartow


-Rick Bartow


-Rick Bartow


-Rick Bartow

I have mixed feelings about these paintings. Undoubtedly they have a compositional strength, great energy, and a great color sensibility. At the same time, they exhibit many of the elements too common in a lot of the art from the late 1960s and 1970s... elements that I saw far too much in my own Art School professor's work.

By the way... I quite like his sculpture...





... and prints:

[Ecurb]

Interesting post, stluke. In general (and it's certainly true for Bartow's work) prints reproduce better than paintings. Also, many of Bartow's paintings involve dual images -- people transforming into animals or spirit animals. The transformations are not captured well in photographs; in the originals the blending of the images is more dramatic.

The sculpture you posted a print of with the hand on one end and the coyote on the other is called "From Nothing Coyote Creates Himself". OF course sculptures don't reproduce well either -- we lose the texture and the three dimensions in a photograph.

When I was looking at the exhibit, one of the people I was with commented that she thought a painting looked like it was influenced by Goya -- and later in the exhibit we came across a painting that was called "After Goya" (or some title that made it clear that it was an homage to Goya).

Here's a link to the website for the exhibit: http://aamg-us.org/wp/wp-content/upl...ot-Explain.pdf

I wish I knew how to post pictures -- like Stluke does --but the graphite drawing on page 5 of the power point is the one my friend thought looked like a Goya. Also, there were some very good flower paintings at the show, done on handmade Japanese paper. The paper itself was as delicate as the petals of a flower -- I'm sure these wouldn't reproduce well, though.

Thanks for your thoughts about Bartow's influences. I wasn't familiar with them.