In Conversation with Bo Bartlett: “Parents”

This second part of our interview series with acclaimed artist Bo Bartlett comes from an interview we conducted while he showed us around the Bo Bartlett Center, 921 Front Avenue, in May of this year. Our first installment found Bo discussing how the Center came to be and some of his feelings on art, particularly the way art can unite communities. In this part of the interview, we visit a specific painting currently hanging in the Center.

Tom Ingram: They’re your parents.

Bo Bartlett: They are my parents. It’s my mother and my father. I tell people, it’s a self portrait in a way because all we are is our parents put together, the male and the female, put ‘em together and that’s what we get. It’s the DNA; that’s where we come from. The paintings [in the Center] are often about a union of opposites, mostly. Most of them, whether it’s black-white, male-female, light-dark.

My father was more gregarious. You see him looking out at us. My mom’s much more sort of calm and still. And he’s wearing the flag lapel pin, while she’s wearing this calm green coat, looks like it’s from The Masters or something. Her eyes are closed. So you’ve got these two sides—but the distance between them is an actual part of the painting, that’s the entity, the space between them. And there’s this pretty packed energy in that space, on the wall, the white on that wall.

He’s got the window, going outward, because he’s more outward looking. She’s got the dark, dark doorway because she’s much more reserved. And in between them is a table, and that table—a lot of the paintings [in the Center] are inspired by other paintings. One of the great things about what we’ve done [at the Center] is we’ve used this app, the HP Reveal App*, you can go up to each painting and you put your phone up to the painting and the app tells you what painting inspired what you see here.

TI: What wonderful magic is this? [Note: I was unaware of the HP Reveal app at the time of this interview. It’s an awesome app. Get it. Use it. Test it out at the Bo Bartlett Center, even!]

BB: There’s a particular painting by John Singer Sargent—I know isn’t this fantastic?

TI: It’s the coolest thing I’ve seen in quite a while.

BB: There’s John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife. So that’s one of the influences—there are many—but for each painting we just chose the primary one. Also, this table is a tableaux from looks like a painting by Andrew Wyeth called “Groundhog Day.” So that was the inspiration for that. Then there’s the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait by Van Eyck; has the chandelier between the married couple, and there’s the viewer’s reflection up there as well.

It’s a combination of all these things, all these styles and interests that I have. I did it in ’84, and I was just getting started and feeling comfortable doing the larger scale paintings. I had my first show in Philadelphia in 1980, and that show also came to the Columbus Museum in 1981. I had some large scale paintings then, but by this point in ’84 I was really sort of on the hose and feeling comfortable.

TI: This one seems like an interesting place to talk about dualisms and how they are synthesized or resolved. She’s very well dressed, the gold neckless, he’s obviously very dapper in the suit, yet I notice this is the simplest card table that everybody has. So choices like this are always interesting to me.

BB: It wasn’t by accident. Everything in a painting has a purpose and a reason to be there, and I choose those subjects carefully. I wanted it to feel like the house that I was born in, which was actually over there on Bamboo Street in Columbus, over by Rigdon Road. I lived there until I was two-and-a-half, and I do remember it. I remember the feeling of the house. When I did this painting, I wanted to set it in that location, but I wanted it to feel rather—ghostly isn’t the right word. But timeless, in a way. My parents weren’t this age when they lived in that house; this is the age they were when I painted them, thirty-plus years after they lived there. But I wanted them to feel like they were temporarily inhabiting the house. And that was actually my mother’s card table, and I watched her play bridge on it many, many times, so I borrowed that from her.

TI: So we have her table, and there’s some china, which seem more of a feminine choice than a masculine option.

BB: And there was another chair there which I took out in the bottom left side, which would have been his chair. Temporary furniture in this nicer kind of space. The space where I had them pose was actually here on Broadway. I rented a studio one summer above where Picasso’s Pizza is, in those loft spaces. I did several paintings there. I did the studies there, actually went back to Philadelphia, finished it in my studio up there. But it was set in this space.

TI: Why don’t we move over here and talk about “Young Life;” what do you think?”