Bo Bartlett

BO BARTLETT

BO BARTLETT

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

BO BARTLETT: GOUACHES

By Chris Crosman

On this island there were no human ghosts, no ghosts of any ancient race.

The sea, and the spume and the wind and the weather, had washed them all out, washed them out, so there was only the sound of the sea itself, its own ghost, myriad-voiced, communing and plotting and shouting all winter long.

And only the smell of the sea, with a few bristly bushes of gorse and coarse tufts of heather, among the grey, pellucid rocks, in the grey, more pellucid air.

The coldness, the greyness, even the soft, creeping fog of the sea! And the islet of rock humped up in it all, like the last point in space.

—D.H. Lawrence, “The Man Who Loved Islands,” 1928 Of course, Lawrence’s protagonist, Cathcart, was only trying to find an escape from the horrors that men do to other men and to themselves in the aftermath of the muddy trenches, bloodsoaked river valleys, and desolate fields that haunted veterans of “The Great War.” Nothing could be further from Bo Bartlett’s own enterprise—except, perhaps, those great mysteries of nature that islands seem to hold more closely, even jealously, against a too busy, too loud, too unfocused world. That said, there is, too, in Lawrence’s island soliloquy and in several of these fresh-air-infused paintings a quality of solace and renewal. Bo Bartlett’s relatively small gouache paintings, produced during summers in Maine in 2016 and 2017, come as something of a respite from the larger, more dramatic and metaphor-infused, more intellectually and psychologically charged, and seemingly more ambitious paintings for which he is best known. “Seemingly,” because the smaller

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works have different levels of complexity, metaphor, and magic. The gouaches are the embodiment of those recurring, peaceful interludes of island life between loving and working and a kind of symbiotic coalescence of the two that, for artists, is gently reinforced by island living because of the lack of alternatives or modern distractions.

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And while the gouaches may be, as Bartlett himself notes, warm-ups for the large oils, they are quintessentially evocative of the things the artist most treasures at the level of why he paints—how a brush and pencil can carve structure, shoreline, ledge, and human presence from light and air.

Gouache, although water-based, is an opaque medium that allows revision and has greater texture than watercolor. It also rewards a certain lightness of touch, as luminosity is enhanced when light hits its multifaceted, chalk-like molecular structure. It is a medium that in skilled hands is conducive to evanescent effects like fog, twilight, blanching sunlight, or the littoral revelations of shorelines between the rise and fall of tides, where the medium elides into what is represented—Lawrence’s pellucid rocks and air. If these are mere “warm-ups” for the artist, they are also the most direct and accessible way into work that begins and mostly ends with nature’s—including human nature’s—eternal rhythms and fluid meanings, as colored and washed by memory and personal experience.

Bo Bartlett and his wife, the painter and musician Betsy Eby, spend summers on Wheaton Island in mid-coastal Maine, where they have designed similar, though separate, studios, which are variously depicted from different angles and viewpoints in many of the paintings in the current exhibition.

The studios, their renovated 1905 fisherman’s cottage, and the outbuildings nudge up against the land and rocks like the local puffin nests located on remote Matinicus Rock, a protected wildlife sanctuary housing these small, endangered seabirds. Nearby Matinicus Island (not to be confused with the puffins’ more distant islet home) is about 22 miles out to sea in the Gulf of Maine. It is the farthest from the mainland of any year-round, inhabited island in the Maine archipelago. From the

Bartletts’ ocean-facing studios on Wheaton Island at the entrance to Matinicus Harbor, the fetch, as the saying goes, is Portugal with nothing but open ocean in-between. Looking east across the sea from their small foothold on the island, the view takes on vast connotations that affect their daily lives—transportation, shelter, food, work, rest—and how these are affected by large and small shifts in wind direction. Neither politics nor art seem to matter so much on the island. And weather is a life-and-death topic of conversation.

They named the house on Wheaton Island “Stillpoint” after a passage in T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” from his Four Quartets, the poet’s celebrated late-in-life meditation on time and its passage, “neither from nor towards.” Eliot, Bartlett’s youngest son, passed away several years ago and, according to the artist, “we started construction [on the studios] the year after Eliot passed away…in part as a way to survive.” Along with these studios—places of spiritual and physical creativity—there is no more eloquent memorial than Bartlett’s Blue Skies series of paintings that invoke a favorite song, “Blue Skies,” loved by both father and son and a modest hit by the British indie group Noah and the Whale. With their message of better, brighter times, the small, monochromatic paintings are the product of countless hours spent focusing on singular, cloudless patches of clear, blue sky at different times of day and from different angles. Among other challenges was the lack of any focal point and the artist’s fierce need to record “real” sky in real time—rendering nothingness real.

The excruciating process lends these obsessive paintings their poignancy: testament, no doubt, to the pain of being in such a moment. Several of the gouaches in this exhibition rehearse a crystalline, uninflected Maine sky: Binaries, with its azure, cloudless horizon above the poignantly empty white Adirondack chairs and nearby studio; and High Tide, among the most ravishing paintings of the entire series, with a blinding interior view through open French doors and transom, perfectly framing different segments of intense, colored light that seems to have been inhaled by the room itself. For Bartlett, “Painting is a living thing.”

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Paintings in the present exhibition recall the work of several of the artist’s heroes, from Thomas Eakins to Winslow Homer to Edward Hopper to Andrew Wyeth, all of whom Bartlett acknowledges and occasionally quotes or indirectly paraphrases in his own paintings. But it may have been Andrew Wyeth’s wife, Betsy, who affected him most deeply, especially in the context of Bartlett’s cinematic sensibility and, also, in the spare precision and “camera eye” cropping of these quintessentially coastal Maine gouaches. Over the course of four years in the early 1990s, Bartlett and Betsy Wyeth worked closely together on a retrospective documentary film of Andrew Wyeth’s life and work entitled Snow Hill. The entire structure of Snow Hill, its rhythms, measured pacing, sharply clipped cadences, and dissolving montages, as well as the use of stillness; minimal, terse narration; doorway- and window-framed shots; and even the Edenic ardor of the Shaker hymn-laced soundtrack, belong to an aesthetic sensibility, shared with Bartlett but honed by Betsy Wyeth over fifty-plus years of looking at, gently influencing, and confirming her husband’s enigmatic work. Bartlett directed the film, and his own well-developed cinematic sensibility coincided with Betsy Wyeth’s minimalist point of view in Snow Hill. It’s within reason to suggest that Bartlett’s sense of movement and sequence in these gouaches can be viewed, however indirectly, as homages to Betsy Wyeth, an often overlooked mentor and creative catalyst whose buildings on Benner and Allen Islands became settings for her husband’s late paintings. Unquestionably, she would respond to the quietude found in these gouaches.

Island Studio/Quiet Afternoon is a case in point. Eby’s clapboard studio structure rises, sentinel-like, resolutely crowning the yellow curve of a grassy knoll. The studio is embraced from the left and right horizon lines by fluttering blue pennants of oceanic welcome, accounting for the reflected blue and turquoise colors scuffing the pristine, white clapboard siding, eaves, and gables. An echoing gabled roof extension is centered discretely on the building’s back wall. Evoking nineteenth century fishermen’s cottages and outbuildings, the structure discreetly suggests its twenty-first century function with ample skylights. No other marks interrupt the white, hazy summer sky that is, in fact, the untouched Arches watercolor paper.

Betsy’s Studio on a Gray Day, Island Studio/Quiet Afternoon, and Outpost show the same architectural form from several points of view and at different times of day. As with every gouache in this group, qualities of summer light are the center of attention, supported by perfectly tuned call-andresponse discourse between organic and geometric forms, freedom and control, movement and stasis, representation and abstraction.

Where Island Studio seems strongly anchored to its site and well back from threatening seas, Ledge House, is akin to the aforementioned puffins’ nests, barely clinging to its granite-ledge outcropping over which the artists’ home is partially cantilevered (it is unclear whether the right side is even on land). An attached “el” reaches for its own footing, bridging the space between ledges, figuratively grasping for whatever might be the builders’ equivalent of a lifeguard’s buoy as it abandons ship. The simple New England structure with an array of clean, carefully balanced six-over-six windows, and chaste horizontal and vertical lines counter the visual instability of the landscape. There is a stripped-down implied narrative: only an artist whose life depends on proximity to natural grandeur and to what can only be described as uncontrollable beauty would consider living here. Anyway, what the locals know about North Atlantic gales is no deterrent to a certain willful madness. Bartlett, after all, paints immense sharks, gutted by a “Virginia Cavalier” T-shirt-clad youth revealing the shrouded body of another youth in the animal’s belly.

Part Moby Dick, part biblical Jonah or Christian Resurrection, and part hallucinatory football weekend bonfire, the painting confirms what native Matinicus Islanders suspected all along. Like Annie Proulx’s Shipping News pirates, they’ll salvage the house when it’s swept away and sell the remains to the next crazy artist from Georgia. It’s all part of why Bartlett loves Maine and how he sometimes thinks about it.

That and the moist salt air driven ashore by passing storms like Hermine, a hurricane that brushed Georgia before dissipating off the mid-Atlantic Coast. In Passing Hermine, a tiny white Adirondack chair sits at the composition’s centered vanishing point, just visible in the distance near the crashing

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surf. The chair pulls the eye into the pictorial space and holds the viewer there, suspended between land and sea. It appears to be a blustery, late summer day, still warm enough to sit or paint on the broad deck of Eby’s studio but blowing enough to think twice about rowing to Matinicus. This and other paintings contain underlying pencil or ink drawing, and the thinly applied paint allows the drawing to show through. It’s a technique that Bartlett learned directly from Andrew Wyeth (who learned it by looking at watercolors by Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper). Tension between the rough terrain and churning ocean is played against the planar calm of the flat deck and the oblique, wind-sheltering exterior studio wall. The collision of nature and culture is literally true sometimes.

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The loose, sketch-like Boat House leaves us to ponder where the boat might have gone, absent its oars, which are leaning against the corner walls. The painting appears unfinished at first glance; it is, however, more a matter of stopping when any painting says all it needs to. Dripping gray fingers of paint point toward the bottom edge, as gravity operates in concert with the painter’s decisive stroke, a silent celebration of intentionality, allowing the accidents that all artists accept and utilize.

Elsewhere, a wall dissolves in layered, swooping washes where yellow-gray and gray-yellow summarize a quality of unfixed-ness that the tilting ocean glimpsed through the window seems to reinforce.

Painting about painting is not exactly new, but painting that pictures its own messy, chaotic genesis is how artists reinvent themselves and their work. Warm-up or not, it’s thrilling to witness an artist working his medium, fearless and confident, conscious of and alive to change.

Within the present group of gouaches, the only overtly human intrusions are a seminude figure in The Outer Shoals, who, between the expanse of plain white clapboard structures and the unlimited, emptiness of ocean and sky above, somehow seems overdressed. In another painting, The Day You Came to Pose, human absence is highlighted by Eby’s bicycle, an unadorned “cruiser” style bike better suited to the flats of tidewater Georgia than to Wheaton’s ice-age terrain of erratic-formed

granite outcroppings and hardy, nettle-like vegetation clawing island and islander alike on the barely 20-acre island (at high tide). It is also doubtful his model arrived on the bike (unless it was his wife), but the suggestion of transport and movement is reified by the bike’s shadow on the studio wall—Peter Pan shadow-magic seems an ever-present, albeit elusive, companion on their island, well-suited to quick sketches before light ducks behind scudding, fair-weather clouds. Bartlett also keeps a bike there, and he and Eby occasionally ride together or separately, exploring their small, wild rock pile nestled on the edge of endlessness. Bicycles are featured prominently in Noah and the Whale’s music video of “Blue Skies.” Bartlett and Eby, riding or walking the shoreline of their island, their own “last point in space” in the vastness of the North Atlantic, would know that walking an island is to understand that endings are also beginnings.

Bartlett loves high art and literature but he also loves pop culture, and his paintings often incorporate multiple references simultaneously—from the Bible to William Butler Yeats to Harper Lee to indie rock. Another southern storyteller with New England ties, James Taylor, wrote his classic lullaby, “Sweet Baby James,” for his brother’s newborn son—“he sings out a song which is soft but it’s clear—as if maybe someone could hear.” Just so, with Bartlett’s fog-shrouded Silent Seas and its sunburnt companion, Station. In some sense, all of Bartlett’s gouaches are short, sweet songs sung to himself, softly and clearly, as if others—his Georgia family, the Matinicus fishermen, his wife, his children—are yet close enough to hear. Softly, clearly, that is whom the paintings are for and what n they are about. Warm-ups for the soul.

Chris Crosman is the former Director of the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, and the former Founding Chief Curator at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. He currently lives in Thomaston, Maine.

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August 11, 2016, 2016 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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Silent Seas, 2016 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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Island Studio/Quiet Afternoon, 2016 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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Boat House, 2016 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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Passing Hermine, 2016 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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Harbourside, 2016 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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Betsy’s Studio on a Gray Day, 2016 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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Binaries, 2016 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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The Outer Shoals, 2017 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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High Tide, 2017 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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August 7th, 2017, 2017 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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Ledge House, 2017 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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Outpost, 2017 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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Station, 2017 Gouache on paper 15 1/4 x 22 1/2 inches 38.7 x 57.2 cm

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The Day You Came to Pose, 2017 Gouache on paper 22 1/2 x 30 inches 57.2 x 76.2 cm

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Diaspora, 2016 Oil on linen 82 x 100 inches 208.3 x 254 cm

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Dominion, 2016 Oil on linen 82 x 100 inches 208.3 x 254 cm

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The Swing, 2017 Oil on linen 60 x 60 inches 152.4 x 152.4 cm

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Outrider, 2018 Oil on linen 48 x 48 inches 121.9 x 121.9 cm

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The Flood, 2018 Oil on linen 82 x 100 inches 208.3 x 254 cm

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

BO BARTLETT 31 May — 7 July 2018

Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2018 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2018 Chris Crosman

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Photography by Christopher Burke Studios, New York, NY Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY ISBN: 978-0-9994871-6-7 Front cover High Tide (detail), 2017 Back cover Boat House (detail), 2016

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY