ink jet prints on archival paper, mounted on wood canvas stretchers

larger image of installation

Above is one of my drawings from the class; I was 17 or 18. Were I the teacher I might compliment the aggressive foregrounding (Barbee didn't tell us which part of the skeleton to draw so that was my framing) and the almost abstract emphasis on patterning in the bones and shadows. Or perhaps the use of the hand bones as a punning coda to the rib arrangement. My recollection is that Barbee stopped in front of the drawing and said something like "The xiphoid process should be more elongated, and you need to work on the angle of the acromion." That's the only kind of comment he ever offered.

Later, I decided to complete a studio art major in my last year and a half of college (plus a couple of summers), after having finished my required courses for an English Lit major. Barbee was the only instructor who opposed this "crash course" of almost full-time art practice. He felt like a major should be stretched out over four years of schooling. I had "A" grades in every art class I took except Barbee's. He gave me a B for the Life Drawing class and a C+ for his figure painting class (where students hammered out anatomically correct "mud women," as another professor called them). His reasons for the grade had nothing to do with the quality of the paintings but his belief that I didn't work on them obsessively enough. He pointed admiringly to another classmate, Susan F________, who came in after class hours to work on her painting. (Which is true but she was a clumsy painter and her piece was probably worsened by all the extra effort.) Barbee also candidly admitted he gave me the C+ because he felt I shouldn't be taking so many art courses at the same time.

At the time I took his classes I had never seen his own work. Years later I saw an image of some tree logs in a swamp (I think) done in a somewhat Thomas Hart Benton-esque style. I wasn't too impressed. I was correct about his military background. An obituary notice for Barbee [https://art.as.virginia.edu/sites/art.as.virginia.edu/files/FallWinter2002.pdf] says that his "early training was interrupted by World War II, when he served in the Army Air Force as a bombardier/navigator in Italy." The writer goes on to note, diplomatically, that

"Bob’s work was widely exhibited early in his career. He was represented by a well-regarded gallery in New York, and was included in regional exhibitions in Virginia and the Southeast. His early paintings show the influence of Cézanne and some of the School of Paris painters who were fashionable at mid-century, influences that became less and less important as his art matured. His painting became less abstract and more personal. He came to rely more and more on his keen observation and his real gift as a draftsman. He worked slowly and carefully, sometimes spending years on a painting, and became less interested in exhibiting his work or promoting himself as an artist."

So the moral of the story is, spend years on a painting.

1990
oil on canvas, 12 x 9 inches
private collection

see also Black & White Raccoon

detail from Arbitration Drawings, ink, acrylic, collage on paper, 1993

ink jet prints on archival paper, mounted on wood canvas stretchers

ink jet print mounted on wood canvas stretcher, 12 x 12 inches

installation view with other "stretcher pieces"

This is a "remix" of an old painting. The original oil-paint-on-linen was configured as a rectangle, in landscape format, 22 inches tall by 26 inches wide. For the remix I formatted it as a square and removed a signature in the lower right corner, otherwise it looks the same. I had a 4x5 photo-transparency of the painting so was able to get a clear, detailed scan.
The original image appeared in color in a Houston gallery guide, in conjunction with a show I did at W. A. Graham gallery the next month. The painting ended up not appearing in the show.
I thought of this because it's similar to work I've been doing recently. Some might say better -- it's certainly more action-packed. I think I'm calmer now than I was around the time of the First Gulf War.

An example of what the previous online sketch looks like printed, with ebay-friendly carpet underneath. A detail of the print:

Thanks to the reader who bought one of these, the support is greatly appreciated.

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