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About Smoke signals. (Grand Ronde, Or.) 19??-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 15, 2004)
6 FEBRUARY 15, 2004 Smoke Signals FEBRUARY 15, 2004 Smoke Signals 7 Bffaws Kmd Litres TmEasffoirmattioEii If . I Strange, But True This 1987 piece is called, "Salmon Mask." The carved wood, mixed media mask is currently part of the fine art collection of The Heard Museum in Phoenix. Bartow continued from front page old can draw this." "It has to have some power to piss people off," Bartow said. "All I did was draw a picture and win a prize and he hated me for it." He shared his connection, however, with those who don't or won't understand his work. "I hate contem porary art," he said. One example he gave was "video installations." "I'm as guilty as the next guy in not understand ing and not wanting to understand. It's funny. You get really emotional about it and you don't know what it is." But fellow artists get emotional about Bartow and they know just what it is. "He is one of the best artists I know," said Lillian Pitt, Warm Springs-Wasco-Wishxam artist (See Smoke Signals, 1015 02 issue), whose work is derived from artifacts and designs of the ancient Columbia River Indians. Her work, "River Spirit," is up now at the Tri-Met sta tion at Ainsworth and Interstate and the Hallie Ford Museum at Willamette University has just installed an exhibition of her work that will run through t r ' J? RICK BARTOW,, r My Eye Check It Out The book, My Eye, represents work that has been traveling as a show for more than two years. March 20th. (Bartow created the poles from which some of Pitt's masks are shown.) The shop at the Spirit Mountain Casino is cur rently featuring her jewelry designs. "I le's uninhibited. He does what he feels and he doesn't edit himself. So many of us get kind of afraid to do anything that's too con frontational or out there. He has great courage to risk all these things and he's not afraid to show himself." Bartow, 57, is an internationally recog nized artist whose awards and fellowships stretch from the Oregon Arts Commission to Philadelphia's Brandywine Visiting Art ist Fellowship, from the Seattle Art Mu seum to the Smithsonian National Mu seum of the American Indian in New York City. His work is shown in more than 30 corporate and public collections, from The Heard Museum in Phoenix to Paper Nao in Tokyo. A rundown of his accomplish ments and successes runs 14 pages. His work first was compared with Ger man Expressionism, partly because of the way this group of artists paints and draws, but also because they both share a tough social commentary, according to Charles Froelick, Bartow's agent and the owner of the Froelick Gallery in Portland. Froelick has represented Bartow's work since 1995. Bartow also is considered a Transforma tional artist because of the way his work crosses boundaries. One way to look at it is to see his subjects span human and ani mal exteriors, but another, said Froelick, is because "Rick knows that as a person and as a culture, we're not going to grow or have a positive transformation unless we directly address the issues that are most frightening in our lives, the issues that are most serious and sometimes, they are dark." If it's a struggle to follow the art world's trends and labels, rest assured that they fade pretty quickly in the company of the artist himself. Bartow is Yurok from his father's side and a native Oregonian with a strong sense of both his Indian culture and his deep roots in the countryside. Bartow's home and studios are a pleasant combination of old and new construction, but the newer additions are small, handmade structures, all seemingly visitors to this in viting and rambling property that sits by and maybe a little above the Yaquina Bay mudflats. Bartow might first invite you to see his tele vision. It turns out to be an old porch with a couple of old wooden chairs on it. In the morn ing, the sun could be giving you the once over as you and Bartow look out into the field. Be yond the field are the mudflats bordered with the cattails that his former wife, Julie Ann Swan, planted and later used for making bas kets. Beavers have dammed the flats nearly into a pond. The show on this boob tube one re cent morning was a crow screaming at some thing or other out there and the geese head ing noisily back north before the rush hour. The Many Sides of Rick Bartow Bartow equals Yurok equals South Beach equals fragging in Vietnam equals a rhinoceros beetle under his hat equals a rummy drunk equals teacher of the troubled equals the ideas and experiences he slams onto ancient hand-made paper from Japan equals a bunch of studio buildings erupting as innocently as a succession of a mole made dirt piles equals "It's make-do and that's the way I like it" equals a steel guitar and country blues Thursdays at Mo's Annex equals crow and bear and coyote equals their myths equals their spirits equals no comfort like a storm outside equals "things are bang ing on the window and I'm working in this little place" equals hope equals death equals education equals freedom of desire equals transformation equals My Eye, the 2002 u 1 IT monograph of the Bartow show. The 50 or so pieces in the exhibit have been a traveling show for two years, said Froelick. Such equivalents, championed by Pulitzer Prize winning Beat poet Gary Snyder (with whom Bartow is acquainted), are ways to see the artist's many sides. He was raised to understand, "We're part of this thing, not outside of it." Look at the eyes in his work. As with people and animals off the page, the eyes are where Bartow looks for the true heart of his subjects. "The ba sic thing is working on the eves. It is work ing on humanity, on life-ness," he said. In Vietnam, he had Top Secret clearance which he can't explain because what he did was play gui tar to the wounded in military hospitals. He recalled 12-hour stints, "getting a little high" (alcohol, he said, "greased the skids for a long time") and going from one end of an army hospital to the other, "playing for napalm children, playing for na palm families." Sometimes he didn't know if they were dead or alive. Sometimes they died while he was playing. As a result of the experience mixed with a grow ing drinking problem, he long thought of himself derogatorily as "the only guy (in Vietnam) who got a Bronze Star and an Oak Leaf Cluster for playing guitar in hospitals." He described units of men arriving at camp one night and he might not have met a single one when he learned the next day that 75 percent of them al ready were dead. And then there were the dead soldiers from his hometown of Newport. He called his response to all this death, "survivor's guilt," and faced nearly a decade of depression and sometimes raging alcoholism in those years. Now, he is 23 years sober. He never once fell off the wagon. "I think I received the one thing they talk 7T about freedom of desire," he said but his work con tinues to draw from these wellsprings of experience. He is living what he calls "a second life two times over." There's his recovery from the scars of the Vietnam War and then there's his family. Among others over a lifetime, including his father who died when he was five, he lost Julie Ann, his former wife, to breast cancer. He pointed to the building, and the place in the build ing where the sun shines through dusty windows, where she closed her eyes for the last time. "Being there as the life went out of my wife's eyes, it makes you acutely aware of death." From his marriage to Julie Ann, he has an 18-year-old son, Booker, who now also nurtures an in terest in art; he has a daughter, Ronda and three grandchildren; and he is married again, to Karla Malcolm, hired by Julie Ann years ago to tutor Booker. With Karla, Bartow has a 15-month-old daughter, Lily, who was named in two dreams prior to her birth. The name, Lily, means "I love you" in the sign language for the deaf, which Karla knows from working with deaf and abused children. The property under Bartow's South Beach home and studios has long been in the family, though Bartow's dad sold part of it to pay for his college education and Bartow himself now rents part of it back for his home and work spaces. He feels guilty about "drawing lines" for a living when others are working the land and building things. And while the business of art is going pretty well for him, he feels a great obligation to provide for his children as his parents provided for him. He remembers his parents more than providing. He remembers them picking him up out of the gut ter in front of a bar while he cursed them out. "They saw me at my lowest... and they still loved me the next morning." Guilt and death have long informed his work. "We're made as much by what we lose as by what we gain," A : I- i -k I I f I 1 H 11 U ''I' , 4 ...Ml .b7 I ' 7 . fl f ' AT 'J $ v if - FX 1 .. ' 1. ft MM- At Work Bartow works quickly, moving color around as much with the fat of his hand as by adding pastel chalk or graphite to the paper. He favors ancient Japanese papers. Note the skull drawing just behind him: his work is more than casually informed by the breath of death on his neck. he said, but the gifts he has for art and, for that mat ter, music, long preceded life's unwelcome intrusions. "I've always been an artist," he said. Along with the counsel of darkness, Bartow has used his education in mythology both Indian and ancient Western and the arts to articulate ideas Photos by Ron Karten ' . m xr ' ' T ' r Dark Man In The Light Of Day This is Bartow in front of his 'television,' currently showing reruns of the Yaquina Bay mudflats, as the artist talks about his life and work. ' ' ir )';1' ! ; .'mi v 1 i, 1 and participate in the long, historical stream of art ists that have told us stories and revealed truths since the beginning of time. "He's always got his eyes open," said Froelick. "He's always looking and reading, checking every art book out of the library." And all is not dark in Bartow's world. "Rick de lights in pure folly, mark-making, and joyous ges tures," said Froelick. He pointed to some of his flower work as examples. Bartow used art as a road out of Vietnam and the ensuing years of drinking and raging. While in Vietnam, he passed time making sculp tures of branches and leaves. After, he made "gobs of money scratching on ivory (scrimshaw)." Now, he's at the drawing, painting and sculp ture full time and there is something in him that willingly shares what he has learned, be it about art or sobriety or dredging up the emo tional secrets that hold so many of us captive. He recalls the words of his friend and former agent, William Jamison, father of Portland's 'First Thursday' art gallery tours, another who died on him. Jamison died in 1995 of compli cations of the AIDS virus. He said that you couldn't always harvest, Bartow said. You had to plant seeds sometimes. For Bartow, the 1 i i - i r j 1 x 1 : A .. r,. I I worK ne aia iur a uecaue as a teaciiei b nue iui , I kids with multiple handicaps fills this bill, as does the work he now does at the MacLaren Correctional Facility for Youth in Woodburn. When he takes on a class or a student at MacLaren, which he has been doing on and off for years, he again looks at art as a way of dealing with life's problems, this time for the kids. For example, he'll say to a kid, "You can holler like this: with a line, with a mark, with a color. Just slam this color into the paper. If you can somehow free up that stuff that's been held back..." Regarding the importance of unloading all the subconscious junk that holds us back, Bartow recalls a line that his uncle, his father's twin, once told him: "You can't throw stuff into a closet that it won't soon start smelling." Tribal member Willard (Wid) Thompson, Treatment Manager at MacLaren, (See Smoke Signals, 121503, "Warrior Interrupted") has worked on many of these projects with Bartow. He credits Bartow as "kind of a guide. He's one of those people that can guide you through life. . . help ing you understand yourself spiritually in the world, how you fit into things in the Native culture." And of the kids Thompson and Bartow work with, Thompson recalled: "I have seen a young man. . .(who) through this art project, he was able to put down his memories in art and through this, he was trans formed from a young man that was heading for a train wreck in life to being a young man who is pro ductive and not in trouble. I honestly believed that that experience in that art room saved his life." Having recently competed in and lost out on an opportunity to be part of the Smithsonian's National Museum exhibit concerning the Oneida Nation and the Revolutionary War, Bartow responded in two ways: "Like anybody else, I stuck my lip out and snooted around for awhile," he said, but he also saw bigger possibilities for the exhibit that were suddenly not to be. "I saw it as a forum much bigger than sculpture. It could have worked with a recovery theme, or six different ways. .. ." Like his art, his Indian culture has been with him from day one. His work began "with mythology and good stories and I still love them. But then, as I started attending ceremonies and digging in on Na tive spirituality at the sweat house, it really started changing things." "I couldn't stop death, but (Native spirituality) helped me over a long period of time to deal with the loss. Transformations within the sweat house and stories of (animals) over time have helped me under stand." Today, he sweats on Mondays with Siletz Elder Walter Klamath. "They honored me as a Veteran and as an artist and I didn't have to be anything but," he said. "Going to the sweat house gave me the idea that I had a gift." He recovered through art with the help of family and friends. He can not underline them enough. He names those from college, neighbors, artists and musicians, and he calls back later to put his parents and family at the top of the list. Bartow works on two or three pieces at a time be cause his efforts tumble out of him so intuitively and forcefully that if he works on only one piece, he said, "I will run right over myself. I fill every available space with art. Especially when I'm painting, I keep stacking myself up until it's ruined." There is something "undeniable" in art for Bartow. "When I stop, I'm not comfortable," he said. But everyone needs a break, and for Bartow, he takes that break with dried flowers. "They show you the impermanence of life, of beauty," he said in his way of making art understandable. But for Bartow, flowers can be unlike those of his pieces where he combines life forms, where he brings in the lessons of myths, where he says thanks to other artists and tries out ideas he's picked up along the way. "Drawing dead flowers," he said, "is like a vaca tion for me."
