Shape-shifting beasts and birds

Rick Bartow, Native American roots and ghosts

Occasionally you encounter an artist driven by a raw vision of things. I found Rick Bartow in Portland Art Museum. He’s haunted by his Native American roots and a post Vietnam war PTSD inner landscape. He paints totems, shamans, mythological figures who are half-man, half-coyote or another creature. Yet neither the creature nor the man is free.

His work moves far beyond traditional definitions of American Indian art.

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

His human-animal hybrid forms shape-shift across their surfaces. Bartow himself referred to his work as gestural expressionism. Because he had to make words for his art. But it is an experience, to be with his work. Bears, Crows, Coyotes, Salmon, Frogs, and Horses are harbingers of magic and the special powers of the Spirit .

“It’s about making the mark, and it’s done in an in-your-face area,” he said. “I work on paper that’s 26 by 40 inches, so when you look at it, the center’s just above eye level of the viewer. It’s right there in your face.”– Rick Bartow

Yes there was an amazing David Hockney show too at Porland Art Museum but this is what blew me away, maybe because we’d just been to the #historymuseumportland, and seeing the cabinets of the remnants of native tribes- shoes, canoes, baskets, pots, knives, lumps of beeswax and obsidian traded with colonisers who would rip the native tribes’ salmon estuaries, rivers and land from them and build the new world and leave them in unmarked graves or force the minds of their young ones into a severe protestant mindset that would never fit into an indigenous mind.

Seeing Bartow’s work after this had me see that some crazed coyote or crow or bear story could rise again with fierce vision out of the ashes. A ferocious cultural storyteller , re-visoner of the old tales and myths #rickbartow #portlandartmuseum #nativeamericanart #art