Gaffney

I was born and raised for the first 14+ years of my life in a small mill town in Northwest South Carolina near the North Carolina border.  Gaffney was located in an area known as the Piedmont, or more commonly, the foothills of the Smokey mountains.  Cotton was grown on the farmlands surrounding the town and fed the local textile industry.  It was a self sustaining industry from the production of raw materials to the production of finished consumer products.  The people of the area either worked directly for the textile industry, or were in some service industry in support of it or the people who worked for it.

My father was an auto body mechanic who worked for Stephenson's Motor Company, the local Ford dealership.  My mother was a homemaker and sometimes worked in the textile finishing industry doing piece work. Our family was at the lower end of the economic scale.  We went without many things, but my mother managed the household frugally and was able to provide the basic needs of the family.  Both of my parents were school dropouts – my father only finished the sixth grade and my mother the tenth.  My father was a natural leader and managed to do well despite being under educated. He eventually became foreman of the dealership's auto body shop.  He had also distinguished himself as a squad leader during the Italian campaign of World War II – receiving two Purple Hearts for wounds suffered in two different battles.  Though we probably teetered on the brink of economic disaster, my parents gave us the security we needed to explore our own worlds.

My older brother, Mike, and I were less than two years apart in age.  We were, in every sense of the words, brothers and friends.  Together, we explored our environment (Gaffney).  Life for a child was much less politically correct in those days – the 1950's and 60's.  There were two unbreakable rules – be home for dinner (lunch) and be home for supper.  Otherwise, we were free to roam as far as our feet could take us in the span of time between meals.  We lived our lives outdoors, close to the things (good and bad) that enriched our life experience.  Mike and I lived and played hard in those early years in Gaffney.  I'm sometimes surprised at the abundance of memories I have from that place during such a relatively short period of time.

So, what does this all have to do with making art?  Everything, if I believe what I've written in my “artist statement”.  I also believe that there are two distinct forms of life experiences – those experienced as children and those experienced as adults.  More succinctly, those experiences from before and after obtaining a driver's license.  As children, we move through life more slowly and with greater opportunity to gather our immediate world with all of our senses.  We are immersed in the natural world and we are able to experience it up close.  We experience many things for the first time – hot/cold, soft/hard, beautiful/ugly, good/bad, harsh/kind, et-al.  These things are indelibly imprinted consciously and subconsciously in our psyche.

I've chosen to use “obtaining a drivers license” to illustrate and delineate the point at which this immediacy of life experience changes to something less immediate.  When we get behind the wheel of a car, we have put ourselves in a kind of insulated space – zooming through the world at a pace too fast to absorb much of what's outside our sealed cocoon.  After a while we resign ourselves to using less honest stimulation for experiencing life.  Consider kneeling on the cool ground beside a slow running stream to quickly plunge your hand into the water to retrieve a small minnow and have it flutter in your hand until you allow it to splash back into the stream to continue its life and you yours.  Consider then, flying by the same stream at 70 miles per hour and hardly even noticing the stream.  This doesn't necessarily mean that we don't continue to have a rich life experience, it's only to say that it has changed.

As adults we begin to think more abstractly.  Sometimes gathering sensory information becomes subordinate to gathering money and pursuing a career.  I sometimes think art is a rebellion against that – a way to plunge our hands back into the stream to capture the minnow.

Technique

Well, maybe not entirely about technique.  Until now I've only posted examples of my works on paper.  I thought it might be a good time to post and discuss a few of my paintings.

I work mainly with acrylic artist paints and sometimes latex house paints  on various surfaces.  I think the support I like most is birch plywood panels which I prepare myself.  I also paint on stretched canvas panels, fiberboard, and canvas sheets (Fredrix brand).  Lately I've been using surface abrasion to take back paint layers.  The hard surface of the wood panels seems to work best for this process.

I have one painting in particular that shows the effect of surface abrasion.  I have one other piece that I haven't yet photographed.  I'll put it in a separate post at a later date.  Anyway here's the one I've completed using this technique.

The Day the Sun Was Square

acrylic on birch plywood, 24"X24"

This painting started with a lot of raised lines (texture) on the lower layers.  After the abrasive process is complete, the surface is very smooth and flat.  Most often I use a small wood rasp that looks much like a fine cheese grater to cut back the layers.  The painting started much like the earlier drawings - with no forethought to subject or direction.  As it evolved I began to be reminded of the scene outside my upstairs studio window.  The scene is a wall of tangled woods with the back porch roof in the foreground.  I added the "square" sun as a kind of rebellion against the paintings seeming representation of a familiar visual image.

The next painting is latex and acrylic on a Fredrix canvas sheet.  For the painting process I mounted the sheet on a drawing board to give it a firm support.  I used mostly a large palette knife to apply the paint.  I may have also used paint markers (Elmer's) for the finer lines - don't really remember.

Blackbirds

acrylic and latex on canvas sheet mounted on fiberboard, 16"X20"

After the painting was complete, I removed it from the drawing board and mounted it to an equal sized fiberboard panel using PVA glue.  The title comes from my own narrative impression of the painting.  In this case I was reminded of a flock of blackbirds or starlings fluttering in a bush or tree.

The next painting uses very traditional techniques.  I used acrylic paints and maybe a little latex house paint applied with brushes to a small square stretched canvas panel.  Again, the process is very extemporaneous with no forethought to subject.

Ghostwriter

acrylic on canvas, 12"X12"

As with the others, the title is my narrative impression of the the final result.  In this case I see ghostly figures and linear marks that appear as impressions of abstract writing.  I'm sometimes surprised at what figures manifest themselves when the subconscious takes over.

I'll be back again with more pieces of art and other discussion topics,

Steve

Darkness

There are a few pieces of my artwork that I am told are dark or even disturbing.  I don't see them that way at all.  They are simply responses to something unpleasant that found its way into my life - a dream, a news event, an experience, something I read, a story I was told, etc.  These are sources (life experiences) that need to be expressed in art just as much as the light beautiful things.  I see it as an expression of cynicism.

There needs to be some cynicism in society.  It protects the naively idealistic among us from the nefarious forces at work in the world.  Optimism should carry a "caution" sign.  It's good to say that "the glass is half FULL" if it is believed to contain something good - with the hope that it will eventually be filled.  However, it is also important to "see the glass as half EMPTY" when it is suspected that it contains something that will kill you.  I usually catch a lot of criticism for what I've said here.  But, I don't really care.  There needs to be a balance of naivete and cynicism (i.e., optimism and pessimism).  We do, after all, live in a world of good and evil, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, et-al.  It is the persistently naive with their heads in the sand who will find themselves unexpectedly sodomized.  David T. Wolf said that "Idealism is what precedes experience. Cynicism is what follows.".

I'm digressing.  I have a couple of pieces of artwork that I want to post as examples of my "dark side" art making.  The first is a little doodle that portrays an innocent looking little figure who has met with a shockingly horrific experience.  I've found that women have the greatest response to this piece.  I think it must be their nurturing instinct.  They may want to sooth the violently anxious lines of the drawing, or place a tourniquet on his bloody arm.

Injured

paint markers and pen & ink on paper, 8"X10"

The second piece is my response to the beheadings carried out by Islamic militants during the past decade.  My brother had sent me a Web link to the video made of the beheading of Nicholas Berg.  The mere thought of the act conjured mental images so horrifically appalling in my imagination that I could never bring myself to watch the video. The drawing is a somewhat satirical approach to the subject.  I think this is because I realized I could never hope to put the emotion into the piece that it deserved.  I think the disturbing quality is simply established because of the implied emotional detachment.  The attitude of the piece is derived somewhat from the Jonathan Swift short story, "A Modest Proposal" which is a satire on England's response(or lack of) to the Irish potato famine.

Heads Stacked Neatly

pen & ink on paper, 9"X12"

Thanks for reading,
Steve

My Epiphany

For the most part I work very extemporaneously.  I leave the conception of a piece to the subconscious in the form of a brief period of meditation followed by a very automatic process of rendering, I allow myself to find an image.  The images take many forms - they may be figurative, portraits, or abstract mind-scapes.  This process grew out of a peculiar circumstance.

I retired from my job just over two years ago.  Approximately a year prior to that I decided I would like to find a way to create art while at work.  So, I bought a drawing pad and put together a small drawing kit.  It all had to be fairly portable.  On breaks and during lunch I would find a quiet place to sit and doodle.  At first it was somewhat frustrating - trying to come up with imagined subject matter.  One day I had the notion to abandon the idea of a concrete mindful subject and just let the drawing happen.  This was an epiphany - an awakening for me.  I had read about psychic automatism (free association) as practiced by the surrealists and abstract expressionists, but had never imagined how I might incorporate it into my own artwork.  Now, since retiring, I have also incorporated this method into my studio painting.  However, I still like the spontaneity of the drawing process.

These are examples of my drawings from about 3 years ago:

Haunted Room

paint markers on bristol, 9"X12"

Nonchalant

pen & ink on paper, 9"X12"

We're All In This Together

pen & ink on paper, 9"X12"

In two of these drawings you will find figurative elements within the abstracted forms.  The titles are my own narrative impression of the pieces.

More soon.

First Post

An introduction -  My name is Steven Barrett.  I live in Toms Brook, Virginia, USA, which is located in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  I've lived my whole life in the South and the past thirty years of it in Virginia.  Probably more than anything else this Southern heritage has shaped my life into who I am.  It would seem that the thread from which you are woven makes the fabric of your creative muse.

I've always believed that knowing something of an artist's life is to better understand their art.  Something is lost (not understood) by not knowing who they are.  So, rather than being a faceless art robot, it's my hope that I can reveal a little of myself here and provide some insight into my motivation as an artist.