Art that serves beauty: the latest Bohuslav Barlow collection
It is several years since internationally known Todmorden based artist Bohuslav Barlow has exhibited his work locally. Ian Emberson visited his Cross Stone home to view his latest collection
"The more we change, the more we are the same" - or so the French say, and I was reminded of this, when, at the artist's invitation, I went to Bohuslav Barlow's home to see his latest paintings.
As I climbed the steep hill to Cross Stone, the bumble bees were buzzing amongst the cherry blossoms, and a peacock butterfly spread its wings by the roadside. In retrospect this seems all part of the total experience, for a new sense of light and colour appears to have flooded into Barlow's work.
It is as if a set of musical variations had modulated from the darkness of a minor key, to the brightness of a major one.
The basic theme of these variations is definitely feminine beauty. Like the poet Petrarch in the fourteenth century, he has taken a Laura for his inspiration. But whilst Petrarch's muse was a shadowy figure about whom little is known, Barlow's Laura is a very tangible girl – a young model with bright auburn hair – the type the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti would no doubt have fallen for.
And like Rossetti, Barlow isn't afraid to paint pictures which are simply beautiful.
Perhaps there is enough ugliness in the world - there was certainly enough in this particular artist's early life. And this beauty was all around me as I stood in Bohuslav's so-called games room, surrounded by about forty canvases.
In fact it was a job to know what to say – one was simply overwhelmed.
Little by little however individual pictures started to tell a story.
One such was 'The Wedding'. What is happening here?
Laura stands slightly askew, clothed in garments of bluish white, which contrast vividly with her auburn hair.
On one side of her is a man – masked – enigmatic – sinister; on the other a wonky church. Down in the bottom left hand corner, even more wonky than the church, is an ancient clock; whilst scattered around are various minor objects: a cat - a bunch of grapes – a dove.
What does the future hold for this beautiful girl? Will she be wedded in this loveless church, and spend a lifetime in the arms of this loveless man, whilst the old old clock registers the long and weary hours? Can she ever know the taste of the grapes, or experience the peace which the dove offers to her?
This we will never discover, for Barlow's paintings give us the clues, but never the answers.
Several times in these recent pictures the artist goes back to earlier themes and reinvents them.
Such a painting is "The Dream". Here his eternal feminine character is clad lightly in a purple dress. She shows no fear of the rocking horse who advances towards her – a dominant manhood to her surrendering womanhood. In the background are those elements which Barlow has used over and over again – the rows of houses, the chimney pots, the viaduct.
Of course they are all derived from Todmorden – although the originals don't lean at quite such a desperate angle. Despite these eccentricities, the mood of the picture is serene. This is a dream – not a nightmare.
Yet at other times Barlow is content to let the sheer loveliness speak for itself. In "Looking back" we have a double image – actually the same model seen from different directions.
It is really a paean in praise of the female body: the graceful curve of the back in the lower form complemented in the figure above by the tender gradations of light on the breasts, and the conviction of the hand resting above the hip. ("Any fool can paint a face – it takes a master to paint hands" - I was once informed.)
Again, in "The Green Violin", a semi-nude Laura plays the violin in question, whilst two dogs at the lower left corner appear to be listening. This harks back to one of the great themes in the portrayal of the human body in Western art – the harmony of the proportions being likened to the harmonies of music. Barlow recurs to it many times, giving some of his pictures a double, or even a treble meaning.
And so I came away from the artist's home, back into the sunshine, and down Cross Stone Road – passing The Old Vicarage, where, in 1829, the 13-year-old Charlotte Bront had penned her first surviving letter. Seventeen years later she was to put into the mouth of Rochester a description of Jane Eyre's schoolgirlish paintings as being the merest "shadow of her thoughts".
Bohuslav Barlow, with his consummate skills has given us more than the shadow. To quote the Russian writer Boris Pasternak, he has shown us that "art always serves beauty".
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Wednesday 23 May 2012
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