Work
Bo Bartlett is an American realist with a modernist vision. His paintings are within the tradition of American realism as defined by artists such as Thomas Eakins and Andrew Wyeth. Like these artists, Bartlett looks at America's land and people to describe the beauty he finds in everyday life. His paintings celebrate the underlying epic nature of the commonplace and the personal significance of the extraordinary.
Bartlett was educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where realist principles must be grasped before modernist ventures are encouraged. He pushes the boundaries of the realist tradition with his multilayered imagery. Life, death, passage, memory, and confrontation coexist easily in his world. Family and friends are the cast of characters that appear in his dreamlike narrative works. Although the scenes are set around his childhood home in Georgia, his island summer home in Maine, his home in Pennsylvania or the surroundings of his studio and residence in Washington State, they represent a deeper, mythical concept of the archetypal, universal home.
His work can be found in private collections, public collections, and galleries throughout the United States.
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Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Every work of art depicts an aspect of reality.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“I can’t work without a model. I won’t say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.”
—Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)
“Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist.... We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.”
—Tristan Tzara (1896–1963)