Bo Bartlett 2024 by Miles McEnery Gallery

LOCUS OPERANDI: HOME

By Patricia Junker

Might the magic be partly in the name of the place. . . . Surely, once we have it named, we have put a kind of poetic claim on its existence. —Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” 19561

Home. It is the title of the canvas that is the summary statement in a group of paintings that Bo Bartlett produced in the prodigious year that was 2010. It is also his name for a particular place. That place, we have learned from the artist, is Columbus, Georgia. Yet Bartlett does not identify it in the titles of his paintings. In fact he has never given us, the viewers of his paintings, any of the diverse particulars of that locale, even as he has embraced the city with ever greater devotion in both his life and his artmaking.

Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, 1948, Tempera on panel, 32 1/4 x 47 3/4 inches (81. 9 x 121.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

Winslow Homer, in contrast, gives us the place names that situate his studio, his art, and his home: Eastern Point and West Point and the landmarks and islands that lie in between along the length of rocky shoreline that is Prout’s Neck, Maine. We can travel there and easily see Homer-like views. Andrew Wyeth painted his home, too, as a series of named places that we can

find on a map and visit: Wyeth World encompasses Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and the Maine Coast and islands—places named Kuerner Hill, Kuerner Farm, and Olson House. All these places were made famous by Wyeth’s art, and they have since been carefully preserved to mimic the treasured Wyeth pictures themselves. But we glimpse Bo Bartlett’s world not via such locatable landmarks; rather, it is a purely poetic concept called home.

Homer’s and Wyeth’s places are for us, the viewers, somewhere else. But home is a place that we all have a claim to. As we confront home in Bartlett’s art, we all have our own point of departure for visual and emotional experiences that such a home offers up. The window onto Bartlett’s world may present it tightly cropped, but the resonances of Bartlett’s Home are limitless.

TOPOPHILIA: “THE ART GOES AS DEEP AS ONE’S LOVE GOES”2

Bartlett embraces what he calls his topophilia: More than a connection, it is love of place.3 Homeland. Heartland. These earlier Bartlett paintings, from 1994, attest that ties to home have always held a tight grip on his affections and imagination, even as he has painted from far-flung places: Florence, Italy, where he first studied; Philadelphia, where he studied and maintained a studio; Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he painted near his dear friend and mentor Andrew Wyeth; and Vashon Island, Washington, where he and his wife, Betsy Eby, also a painter, built a serene, aestheticized environment for their home and studios befitting the site’s name in the local lore, “Inspiration Point.” Home was not these places, however. Rather, “the real home” was always present for him, Bartlett has said, as that place we dream of and inhabit in our dreams: the archetypal home of self.

Sometimes in my studio in the late afternoon, when I’m alone and working and in the hollow, I return to that place in my self, the place that can only be described as being in my own backyard, fully alive at seven. Knowing everything and nothing.4

In 2010, home was the place where Bartlett was headed. He had begun restoring his parents’ house in Columbus, his childhood home, where he would go to live permanently. It was a house that had been untouched by any inhabitants other than the Bartletts. So, triggered by the tangible and ineffable qualities of that house, he conjured a lifetime of memories of love and loss—of the end of his own boyhood, of early marriage and fatherhood, of the death of a brother from cancer, of the charms of a splendid older sister, of the fragility of his parents. The experience of rediscovering his childhood home was overwhelming, he has said. “It’s the house I dream of,” Bartlett said in 2010,

Dust and skin and cells and the hair of my brother who passed and my sister and parents are there. Everything is still there [from] when I drew . . . and scratched on the walls. It’s this giant receptacle of memory. A place where the past, present, and future collide into this moment.5

As if the intoxicating power of such physical and spiritual reconnection with home was not enough to overwhelm the senses, Bartlett’s journey of discovery there, his deep reflection, and his euphoria were heightened further by a new joy in seeing, quite literally. He had just emerged at this time out of a temporary blindness caused by a pituitary tumor that was discovered in 2008. “Home is where . . . we are healed,” he has said.6

I had a friend, he would look at life and imagine it was a dream. In a dream, everything has meaning. If the exercise is to walk down the street as if you’re in a dream, everything you see takes on a slow-motion quality.7

That thought, as Bartlett put it, sets us up to consider his particular realism, which comes from his slowed-down process of looking, seeing, and ruminating on the things he has uncovered and the emotions he has unlocked. Think again about scale: We are inclined to equate focus with a

miniaturist’s vision, with an intensity compressed into tight, closely cropped, small pictures—life stilled, perhaps. But Bartlett’s expansive scale offers a cinematic experience where the eye slowly takes in each delicious moment—of an individual’s expression, say, of dress and details, of light, and of paint—and wanders, questioningly, across the wide screen. He provides something more than narrative: a sensory experience.

In Home (2010), we feel the texture of a subject’s madras shorts, the elasticity of her red knit headband, the suppleness of her black leather ballet flats, cast aside, and the soothing feel of cool grass on her bare feet and its scratchiness on a boy’s knees and palms. We know that time of day when light can penetrate a white linen shirt just so, and we know the quiet that allows a tuckered-out child to lie listening, lost in thought, on the verge of dreamland, perhaps. We take stock and try to make sense of a strange scene—a house of dark windows, a searching youth who crawls to peer around a corner, a forthright young woman at the center, a still baby at the far right. It seems as real before us as life itself. It is at once familiar and curious, because, as Eudora Welty has aptly put it, “Life is strange. Art makes it more believably so.”8

Bartlett has described the creative process as a “transubstantiation of the paint”—the conversion of the oil and pigment into body and soul and place.9 Painting is for him a meditative act, a devotion. His is a slow process, because he works directly from a live model and on site. Bartlett has said that in a quality of light he has heard “God screaming out to me—here I am!”10 He paints light with a devout sense of what the sun is. His gouache studies for Home are frozen moments of light that make a house present, revealing angles, planes, and shadow patterns. The studies are house but not yet home. Home is blood ties, after all, and Bo Bartlett will ultimately people his light studies, referencing Bartletts spanning three generations—parents, siblings, wife, sons.

“A

PAINTING CAN HOLD A CONFLICT OF EMOTIONS”

Returning home to Columbus, Georgia, forced for Bartlett a confrontation with place, with the Southern culture that in part defines him and that has shaped his consciousness. That part of home creeps into paintings that are not overtly self-referential. Speaking about Home, Bartlett describes a landscape and history that have been excised. We would never suspect this, but Bartlett tells us that his childhood home adjoined ages-old timberland:

As a child, on the edge of the forest, these woods had trails that had been there since the Indians were there. Trails through the woods, old trails where African American women would come through with baskets on their heads. One trail was a pathway to another world. At the time when they started to tear those incredible old-growth trees down, a change started to happen, and with that devastation the woods became a giant field. In the Home painting, I’m on all fours on the grass looking to the woods, and they’ve developed that area into a whole shopping center.12

Everyone in Columbus, Georgia, knows about the nearby School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, now renamed Fort Moore, a U.S. Army training facility for Spanish-speaking Latin American military cadets and officers. It was founded to promote “U.S. Army doctrine,” establishing professional standards, fostering cooperation among U.S. and Latin American military forces stationed together, and acquainting the officer-students with knowledge of “United States customs and traditions,” generally.13 On November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests were killed in El Salvador by troops trained at the SOA, just as other innocents had been “disappeared” across Latin America. Every subsequent November, protesters memorialized the victims and protested the school’s presence by staging a “die-in” at the fort’s gates.14 Painting the protesters was Bartlett’s own act of defiance, against the homeland if not specifically his own home.

School of Charm (2010) is an encapsulation of childhood experiences that have taken on larger cultural significance with time. Mabel Bailey was a family friend, and her charm school was near the Bartletts’ house. “She taught etiquette, manners, dancing, modeling, and how to sit and walk (with a book on your head). The painting is as close a recollection as I can muster of the place,” Bartlett has said.15 The lessons he learned there in that time of innocence left a deep impression on him as an artist and a person. His interpretation of this time and place purposely suggests Norman Rockwell’s America, a reference to the first art that came into the Bartlett home via the Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell’s pictures initially defined art for Bartlett as they did for a lot of Americans. Revisiting the idea of Mabel Bailey’s Charm School in 2010 was something of an act of social responsibility in our own time: “How might we restore a modicum of civility to our discourse now?” Bartlett asks. “How might we find common ground with one another now?”16

Returning to pictures of home in 2025 triggers associations only recently accrued, and yet they are top of mind, I suspect, for many of us in our post-COVID world. It can still be difficult to consider the idea of home without summoning the sense of confinement and isolation that we knew in our house-bound lives in 2020. Bartlett’s Home, in its odd seclusion, was a personal dreamscape in 2010. Little did he know that he would paint what in 2025 is a haunting summation of our collective life-changing forced quarantine.

HOME AS COMMON GROUND

When we revisit the Home paintings in 2025, we do so knowing that Bartlett’s home has expanded to include the Bo Bartlett Center at Columbus State University, which was founded in 2018. Bartlett’s paintings are on regular exhibition, his archives are housed there, and the Center is a locus of intellectual and artistic exchange. Bartlett’s home is now, as he designed it, the promise of an inflection point for others. Bartlett now sees Columbus as an artistic community. He feels

Bo Bartlett, Object Permanence, Oil on linen, 120 x 168 inches (304.8 x 426.7 cm)

Cedric Smith, Red Wild Rag, Oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches (60.7 x 60.7 cm)

kinship with other artists who hail from Columbus, and he honors them. Amy Sherald first saw one of Bartlett’s early iterations of Home on display in what is her hometown, too. That was his painting Object Permanence (1986), which depicts the Columbus house, Bartlett’s young sons, and Bartlett himself as a Black man. She experienced, she said, “the power of seeing a painting of a person who looked like me. I essentially built my career around that moment and creating an inflection point for someone else.”17 Bartlett has painted a series of portraits of artists with whom he celebrates common ground. These include Amy Sherald (2024) along with the Columbus-born painters Victoria Dugger (2024), Tim Short (2024), and Fred Fussell (2024), and Cedric Smith (2024) who lives in Macon, Georgia, and originally hails from Bartlett’s other home base, Philadelphia.

Home. It is blood ties, community, roots. It is as personal as a self-portrait, but it is also a cultural touchstone. Bartlett’s painted Home is a private world, but he has painted what Welty would call “the raw material” of “the heart’s familiar.”18 We, all of us, can translate and order the story in our own way.

Patricia Junker is the Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art Emerita, Seattle Art Museum. She established the American art department at the Seattle Art Museum in 2004, serving as the endowed curator for fourteen years. Previously she was Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Amon Carter Museum and Associate Curator of American Paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. She has authored award-winning publications: “Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley and the Spirit of 1916,” received the Smithsonian’s Frost Prize; Winslow Homer in the 1890s: Prout’s Neck Observed won the Henry Allan Moe Prize for scholarship.

NOTES

1I have found Welty’s essay to be an especially useful guide to Bartlett’s themes of home and The South. See Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” South Atlantic Quarterly 55, no. 1 (January 1, 1956), pp. 57-72. The term locus operandi is one she has used here (p. 65), and this line is from the essay, p. 59.

2Andrew Wyeth, quoted in Richard Meryman, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 14. Bartlett has often drawn upon this quote: see his interview with Nicole Pasulka, “Paintings of Home: Bo Bartlett,” The Morning News, October 25, 2010, https://themorningnews.org/gallery/paintings-of-home, downloaded December 21, 2024.

3From an email to the author, January 2, 2025.

4Bartlett, on his painting Kingdom of Ends, in Bo Bartlett: Paintings, 1981-2010 (Vashon Island, WA: Inspiration Point Press, 2010), p. 52.

5Bartlett to Nicole Pasulka, 2010.

6Bartlett, Bo Bartlett Paintings, 2010, p. 52.

7Bartlett to Nicole Pasulka, 2010.

8Welty, “Place in Fiction,” p. 67.

9Bartlett to Nicole Pasulka, 2010.

10Bartlett, quoted in Patricia Junker, “God Is God and Picasso Is Picasso,” in Bo Bartlett: Paintings, 2010, p. 3.

11Bo Bartlett, in “Object Permanence with Bo Bartlett,” video produced by the Bo Bartlett Center, June 22, 2022, transcript and video YouTube, viewed December 2024.

12Bartlett to Nicole Pasulka, 2010.

13The SOA is now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. See Richard F. Grimmett and Mark P. Sullivan, “CRS Issue Brief for Congress: United States Army School of the Americas: Background and Congressional Concerns,” Federation of American Scientists, 1994, https://irp.fas.org/crs/soa.htm, downloaded December 3, 2024. The story of Bartlett’s painting is explained at some length in Stephen Knudsen, “Bo Bartlett: Paintings of Home,” SECAC [formerly Southeastern College Art Conference] Review 1, no. 2 (2011), p. 221.

14Bartlett, in a text to the author, November 19, 2024, author’s files; see also Knudsen, pp. 223-224.

15Bartlett, in a text to the author, November 19, 2024.

16Ibid.

17Sherald, quoted in Jenna Wortham, “Turning Inward,” New York Times Magazine, October 13, 2019, p. 67.

18Welty, “Place in Fiction,” p. 67.