Archives

1998

Oil on linen

77 x 88

My cousin drove through a cow on the highway in Georgia--it flew up in the air and came down on an oncoming car in the other lane, sheering the roof off and killing the driver and the passenger.

In our screenplay, “Things Don't Stay Fixed” by Sandra Deer there is a scene where Sam and Chris hug a cow on a highway at night under the full moon. Chris says that cows are "full of forgiveness." Cows are otherworldly, like aliens. They seem to be ignorant but at the same time seem perfectly content; are those eyes dumb or omniscient? One can see why they are considered holy in the East. Simple complex powerful sacred creatures.

I was thinking about Andrew Wyeth's "Young Bull," "Geurnica" and that bull on the left. And of Titian's "Rape of Europa." The bull is Jupiter. The remnants of the sea are still on the hill. The urchins, like balls, brought up from the depths of the great feminine subconscious sea. I was trying to make it a self-portrait. The cow has rubbed up against a fence ripping a wound in its side. The blood drips in the shape of the Hebrew symbol for "life." (chai).

The cow in the picture 'is Howard' -- owned by the father of my nephew's wife. I photographed him in Odom, GA, while I was down there for their wedding.

-Bo Bartlett

1994

Oil on Linen

134 x 204

For his second work in a series of war paintings, Bartlett was inspired by the Battle of Nashville. The Confederate army was all but destroyed in this battle, one of the few to be fought in the snow. At the center, an angelic Southern belle cradles a former slave, now Union soldier, in a pose similar to Michelangelo's Pietà. In the background, a woman ministers to a white Confederate soldier, while in the foreground another fallen combatant lies with his back to the viewer. The field of white snow, unblemished by the blood of the battle, shines bright as an indication of the reconciliation that was to eventually come.

"This painting became an attempt to come to terms with my own displacement, a Southerner living in the North. Home is a mercurial concept. It disappears and becomes insolvent. The past holds a powerful nostalgic spell over us. Race became a central theme in the painting by default. I morphed the central self-portrait into a black figure in order to find the balance: coloristically, metaphorically and existentially."

1988

Oil on linen

120 x 168

On Damascus Road, Saul of Tarsus experienced a conversion to Christianity on his way to becoming the Apostle Paul. Bartlett sets what appears to be a tragic story on his version of that road. In the center of the composition, a helmeted soldier with his back to the viewer holds a gun. On the right, a mother drags her son off the road towards two men holding a lifeless child. An enigmatic figure, his head surrounded by a broken halo and his chest bound in the manner of Michelangelo’s Christ and slave figures, seems on the point of collapse. On the right, an emergency worker warns the view to stay back.

“Damascus Road still has resonance for me today. This is the hot bed, the boiling pot, right now. The powder keg of what is going on, and it’s still happening right in the same place. The point where divine intervention meets the the real world. You get the conversion of Paul on Damascus Road, and, you see the telephone pole – the lines of communication are breaking down.”

1994

Oil on linen

134 x 204

So in 1994, when I was in Swedesburg, I was going to do a whole series of war paintings. I didn’t want to do war paintings glorifying war; rather, I wanted to do paintings from the point of view of the feminine–the solution to war. A peaceful, non-violent resolution. My first one was Hiroshima, and I had started it in grisaille. It was going to be after the bomb dropped. I was doing some pre-internet research, and I found John Hersey’s book Hiroshima, where he talked about one of the women who was a survivor. She was in her house around 8:20 in the morning, and the “all clear” siren had sounded. The neighbor across the way was tearing his house down shingle by shingle. The mayor of Hiroshima had requested that people tear their house down along certain roads to prevent fire from spreading throughout the town in the case of a bomb being dropped. So people were choosing to sacrifice their houses for the greater good. So she was watching him tear his house down, and her kids were behind her on the mat, safely inside the house. And then behind him there was this yellow flash–BOOM…. About twenty minutes later, she is waking up in the rubble and pushing her roof off of herself. She stands up, and her house is gone. Her kids are gone. Her neighbor’s house is gone. Every house in every direction is gone, and she is just standing there in the landscape. So I used that story to represent the Hiroshima bombing. I decided to back time up to before the bomb dropped. The Enola Gay is heading that way, but it hadn’t dropped yet. I had already done the grisaille of all the dead figures and the destruction, with all the houses blown over, but after reading that story, I decided to bring it back and bring the yellow sky into the early morning light. I put the woman in the field because I thought the action was more important. They were picking rice in the field, and the “all clear” has sounded. They are standing there, and the little boy is behind the mother with a carp kite, symbolizing courage. The vanishing point is ground zero, the Peace Memorial of Hiroshima, way back there in the distance you can see it. Also, the subjects are rather transparent because of their impending disappearance.

–Bo Bartlett

1998

Oil on Linen

80 x 100

This is probably one of my more successful paintings. I was up in Maine sitting at what later became the Dip Net Restaurant, over at Miller’s Lobster Company in Port Clyde. I was thinking about going out to the island and what I was going to work on that summer. I looked up, and there was a print of Homer’s Fog Warning on the wall, so I did a little drawing in my sketchbook of someone rowing a little lifeboat, sort of flipping and turning it the other way and making it fresher and more modern. Then I had everybody in my family pose for it. Man, Will, and I all posed for different parts of it. We found different skiffs in Monhegan that I photographed, and I wound up putting a boat on the grass and working from it, which is why it feels a little bit like he is on a grassy hill. The joke title is “Mid-Lifeboat” because I was at that point in my life when I was definitely mid-life. And it felt like this...the seas were rocky, and there was always something over the next wave, just constant. But if you look closely, The name of the lifeboat is “Jonah.” There is definitely a shark in the water, and you can see it when you look at the real painting, just under the surface. So there are threats everywhere. The wave in the back sort of becomes a dorsal fin, and then the whole thing becomes a whale or shark. The white of the boat becomes the underbelly and the head becomes the eye. It’s like this thing about to start through the water and attack. So this was a sort of precursor to Leviathan, which came later.

-Bo Bartlett

1986

Oil on Linen

120 x 168

Bartlett’s childhood home appears in many of his works, and here it serves as the backdrop to a fascinating family portrait. A father, mother and three children are scattered throughout the composition, each framed by the structure of the house but isolated from each other. The father figure is the artist’s self-portrait as an African American. The pregnant mother holds a bundle, which is semi-transparent, symbolizing the child not yet born. A boy in the front of the composition holds a Moon Pie, the Southern delicacy that Bartlett himself had in his hand when, as a child, he fell into the family pool and learned to swim. Another boy stands inside at the front window and shouts, but no one hears him. The youngest child plays with bubbles, a classic symbol for the impermanence of life.

For the artist, the elements of the painting relate to idea of object permanence, which is the comprehension that objects are real even when they cannot be seen, heard, touched, or smelled, an understanding that babies have not yet developed:

A child who doesn’t see his mother, who has perhaps walked out of the room, thinks he will never see her again and starts crying. If the object is not right there in front of you, it’s gone. So I tried to paint my house. A child is asked to draw his family in school—the most basic thing they ask kids to do is to draw their world...their family. So I was doing sort of a grown-up version of that: the simplest possible request to represent what your life is.

1984

Oil on linen

88 x 112

This painting of Bartlett's parents, set in the interior of his childhood home, is an important early work in the artist's oeuvre. Included are several references and quotations from art history, including the chandelier from Jan Van Eyck's The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, David Hockney's portrait of his parents, and John Singer Sargent's portrait of Robert Lewis Stevenson and his wife, Fanny. Bartlett engages the familiar trope of an active male and passive female found in all of these double portraits, going so far as to his mother with her eyes closed.

"Marriage and balance and imbalance in relationships between male and female is a recurring theme in my work. It has to do symbolically with the union of opposites, the yin/yang, the structural and generative. The male and female are employed to represent something else; even though [the subject] may on the surface be viewed as a couple or a husband and wife, [the painting] is about the struggle for balance in the universe as a whole."

2010

Oil on linen

76 x 90

One of a trio of paintings from 2010, this work explores Bartlett's childhood memories of attending Mabel Bailey's School of Charm, which offered classes in poise and ballroom dancing. In some Southern households of the 1950's, this instruction in good manners was more important than the lessons learned in the elementary school (seen through the large picture window), especially for girls. The work has been likened to a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover, and the pig-tails, red hair, and mischievous smile of the central figure is reminiscent of the unrepentant figure in Rockwell's Outside the Principal's Office.

"The whole thing started with the political atmosphere of everything being so contentious in our society and people being so rude and not having manners anymore. I just remember that when I was growing up they would teach you these things. For whatever reason, it's just "not cool" to teach these kinds of things now. It's just considered so "old school." But what a more civilized world we would have if we still taught that. I'm not saying that in an old fashioned way, I'm just saying that we don't really respect one another and we don't have manners the way we did in the past. There are surely very important things that we must give our attention, but there are also elements that make a culture civilized."