The Transformation of Rick Bartow

Through drawings, sculptures, acrylic paintings and prints, Rick Bartow uses the voice of human experience against personal adversity through his expressionistic works. He melds the literal and the abstract while his schooling in art history, world literature and mythology expands his storytelling.

Hannya II, 2007 Drawing - graphite and gouache on paper 15.5 x 10.5 inches

Bartow began creating art as a child and later decided to pursue art education, earning a Bachelors of Arts in Art Education from Western Oregon State University. Following over a year of service in Vietnam, the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and years of substance abuse to follow, Bartow began to use art as therapy.

“Drawing is medicine”, says artist Rick Bartow. “My work will never stop being therapy.”

His style of expression is self-taught. It wasn’t until 1979 that he began drawing and strictly in charcoal and graphite. He used images from newspapers as models for his first works. They were crude charcoal, monochromatic newsprint drawings. He noticed the Expressionist influence when the erasures were as important in determining the shapes of his images as the material applied. He often fixated on the symbolism of masks falling away from figures, literally representing the rediscovering of himself beneath his layers. By 1983, he slowly brought pastel to his drawings.

“Color took three years to begin to work,” says the artist.

Each drawings begin where he makes marks and erasures intuitively and the form takes the right shape. He often mixes mediums of graphite, pastel and acrylic paint creating disturbing color usage heightening the sometimes horrifying imagery.

After reading on Native American carvers, Bartow experimented with a new medium and eventually tried his hand at carving cedar masks. Since then, Bartow had explored themes in dozens of sculptures, presenting animals and humans in wood carvings or as assemblage of recycled materials take influence from Maori, African and Pacific Northwest coastal wood carving.

Opera, 2007 Sculpture - wood, joint compound 25.5 x 104 x 21 inches

The core of his work involves transformation mythology, both cultural and personal. The mythic images are clearly influenced by the Native American animal totem. For Bartow, this

“makes his own inner beasts visible.”

Though Bartow’s work has explored new areas, the common themes are often the animal totems of Bear, Deer, Owl, but he seems the most preoccupied with Coyote (which often symbolizes folly, wisdom, adaptation, importance of family) and Crow (which often symbolizes watchfulness, cunning, cooperation.) They seem very personal symbols to his life and relationship with art.

The recurrent use of animal totems, which comes from his Native American heritage, is the most common theme in his works. Although his father descended from the Yurok Indian tribe of northern California, and his family became involved with central coastal Oregon’s Siletz Indian community. He claims the totems are “personal symbols and not necessarily a reflection of ancestry.”

In his drawings, which I think is his most interesting work, we see the most transformation imagery- combinations like two faces creating one, man and animal sharing bodies, and the living spliced to the dead.

Bartow says,“I was exorcizing the demons that made me strange to myself.”

He regularly depicts not only man, or animal, but the transformation of man to animal.

Bartow’s warped, child-like characters are contrasted by jarring moments of realism. Each work grabs your eye as you scan the cluttered, but composed elements presented in the vivid, dissonant colors of each story-board.

Through often violent impressions of bandaged bodies and bared teeth in distorted faces we see less of the physical world, more the world of his imagination. I see the dark world of Bosch through the dreamlike combinations of Chagall, and sometimes the multiple perspectives of Picasso through ghost images. He claims these artists as influences, and also claims inspiration from Bacon, Diebenkorn, Janssen and Scholder

Over the last few years, Bartow’s work has taken a different road since collaborating with Master Printmaker Seiichi Hiroshima. The subject matter has common elements of his work from past shows, but in using a dramatically different medium, the appearances are crisper and more color-subdued smatterings of animal anatomical drawing combinations.

Over the decades, Rick Bartow's work is included in public, private and corporate collections throughout the world. He has had solo exhibitions in galleries in Japan, Mexico, Germany, New Zealand, the Pacific Northwest. He has received many honors such as a solo exhibit at The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, The Eiteljorg Museum's Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, a year-long installation in the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden at The White House (97-98), as well as prestigious group shows, fellowships, awards. Through his artistic success, his life has come full circle in teaching through lectures, symposiums and workshops.