Bill Barrell says…. Santa Lives!

 …. Back in 1986, right around Christmas time in Jersey City, NJ, I heard that a Catholic priest had told a bunch of kindergarten kids that Santa did not live. He just did not exist.

Well, it caused a storm. Kids were cyring, mothers and fathers were ranting. The newspapers were having a great time with it.

I am not a religious man and never have been, but I did enjoy the fantasy of Father Christmas when I was a kid. It was always a warm pleasurable time even during the Depression, even during World War Two.

What we received would fit into a stocking, it wasn’t much, but it was always a surprise. Those nights we kids would go off to sleep listening for Santa’s reindeer landing on the roof. Mom and Dad would put out a glass of milk and some cookies for Santa. In the morning, the glass would be empty and crumbs of the cookies were left on the plate. (Dad was crafty enough to put a little cotton wool stuck to the glass.) I believed it all. What fun.

Years later, after reading about this lousy priest destroying children’s dreams, I went to the studio and painted “Santa Lives” for my daughter, who still believed.

Happy Christmas to all!

In the year 2000, Bill Barrell ventured out from Jersey City with artist Jay Milder in search of a building they could transform into studios.

…. I had met Karl Stirner that summer at an exhibition that had taken place on the Lisa Stefanelli estate out along the river road. Karl had said to me, if you are ever in Easton, come on by. So, on that bitterly cold day while looking for a building, Jay and i dropped in on Mr. Stirner to see if he any any ideas. He had plenty.

He really wanted to see artists settle in Easton. He was very gracious and gentlemanly and said he knew of a few buildings we could explore but that it was too late in the day to go looking. Plus, it had started snowing furiously, a blizzard was upon us. Karl invited us to stay overnight as the highway would be treacherous. He fed us dinner and plied us with drinks. We sat into the night talking the pros and cons of Easton and its real estate. He suggested we come back when the weather was better and he would show us around. With that, he took us off to our rooms where we would sleep through the blizzard.

I don’t know where Jay slept but Karl had put me in a room that was full of African sculptures. Karl has an extensive collection of African art. One room he led me into was what looked like the spare parts department. It was full, wall to wall with canoe paddles, arms, legs, torsos, half heads and wooden pots, spoons and god knows what else. People show up at his door with African artifacts. He knows fakes from the real thing.

So, I climbed into my makeshift bed and lay looking at a group of sculptures who stared back at me, seeing me as the curiosity. It could have been quite frightening to some people, but I found it very enlightening. I fell off to sleep with the feeling I was being watched out for.

In the morning, I awoke to my good friends still gazing at me.

We thanked him for his generosity and told him we would be back. We did return and he did help us every which way. I am forever grateful to him for his help.

Note: You can read more about Karl Stirner in the current edition of “laini’s little pocket guide to Easton”. 

Fifteen years ago, Bll Barrell came up with an idea for an art exhibition that traveled in a suitcase…..

by Dominic Capobianco

…. I had a gallery in Jersey City, New Jersey by the name of the Shoestring Gallery.  When it came time for a show to travel, it could be very problematic. Shipping was a big problem. I thought I could solve the problem by inviting artists to find a suitcase of medium size and asking them to construct an artwork that would either stay in the suitcase or come out of the suitcase onto the wall or floor. I mentioned this idea to a good friend, Ron Morosan, who I thought would like to be in the show and perhaps partner in it. He thought it was a great idea and knew of a few galleries we could approach.

The idea was to make it easy to transport. I wrote up the idea and sent out invitations to an assortment of artists. Most responded right away. I stipulated that the artists not make the work too heavy. They were to make it uncomplicated to install, include instructions and whatever they do, do not make it look like a bomb! The suitcases would be loaded onto planes.

We we had the show in Provincetown, one artist we invited from that region did exactly that, a bomb in a suitcase. I told him it was ok for the current exhibition but it could not travel to the next show in London. He was upset – said it was just art. I said,”would you like to go through Heathrow Airport with an object like this?” He didn’t get it. The suitcase did not go to London.

There were many works that I loved in the show.  There was a hat box that when opened had a hat on a coil. One could take the hat and run it twenty feet and hang it from a ceiling. It looked as if it had jumped out of the box.

But the one that intrigued me the most was a piece by Dominic Capobianco, a truly inspired artist. I have posted his piece here on my blog. It is an ingenious work. It is totally the artist capturing himself in a suitcase. The ideal situation for him. He could travel the world as a hobo in a suitcase. All of his symbols are present. When one lifts the lid off the suitcase it lifts a redand blue ladder that is attached to it, making it easier for the artist himself to climb out or for the viewer to descend into his life, his studio, his fertile mind.

There is the bowler hat and a pair of worn work gloves lying gently on top, a reproduction of a nude by the great Henry Matisse reclining on her side with nude drawings etched into the paint below, a skull sporting a red nose, a fried egg sunnyside up, a clock face buckled and bent telling us that Einstein was right about time being bent, a hand crafted band aid, unused, ready for an emergency, a game of tic-tac-toe in progress. A handful of dice are spread across the floor of the suitcase, is it a winning roll? An ancient looking key that opens doors to places never seen before. It is a beautifully painted piece over all with soothing pinks and impossible to imitate blues. A red rose is woven into the lid lending a feeling of love and warmth.

Dominic, who is from the midwest and is a product of the Depression, must have seen hobos and tramps moving across the country riding the rails and looking for handouts. Hobos had a system for marking houses that were either generous or measly people. Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline came out of that era also, an era that brought American artists to the forefront of the international art world. Capobianco brings that era back to us with a wry sense of humor and a great deal of panache. Go to his website, http://thetoonacularstore.net. Check out a painting “The Poets House”. You want to get to that house you are going to have to work at it, working your way through a world of beautiful obstacles and mysterious places.

On this suitcase is the word “Game”. Maybe life is one big game of winning and losing all turning on the roll of the dice.

After Bill Barrell’s opportunity of having three winters in the French West Indies, it was time for his return to NYC.

“It was not easy to set yourself up in NYC in the early 1970s. I raised funds by painting a mural for a patron in New Hampshire. This gave me $2,500 to re-enter.  I could only afford Long Island City where the rents were substantially lower than Manhattan. I had a beautiful raw space loft and I had to put in everything, including the fixtures. There came the problem of earning a living.

What could I do? I had no profession other than artist.

I read an article about a guy who supported himself in Manhattan by walking dogs and had earned $25,000 a year. Great! But I was not fond of dogs and they were not fond of me. One day as a child about four years old, I was in a sweet shop and something stood on my foot. I looked around and was eye to eye with a St. Bernard with its tongue hanging out and breathing all over me. It freaked me out. I was never at ease around dogs again. Dog walking was out.

I thought, well, how about cats? I’ll board them! I put an ad in the Village Voice for two weeks. The first week I did not have one single call. I was sure it was a dud. But the second week the phone rang off the hook. We were in business! We boarded ten cats that week. At $5.00 a pop that was $50 bucks a day!! We could pay the rent with just four days work! It worked out very well and supported us for many years.

At one point, we were able to move to a loft on Lafayette Street in Manhattan, 2,500 square feet for the outrageous fee of $400 a month!   I built a bigger room and some cages for the cats. These were large cages with tree trunks and boxes. It looked like a zoo.

One Thanksgiving holiday we had all the family there. My sister’s son, Tad, loved cats. He was about five at the time.  When I took him for a visit to the cat room, he wanted to get into a cage and be a cat. I put him into a cage with two mild mannered Siamese. Tad looked to me like he would morph into a cat if he stayed there too long.  That’s how this painting came about. I have to put it in my will that if I have not sold it by the time I fall off the perch, it is his.

I am reminded of a movie I saw years ago that applied the alternative thought process. It was called “Sound Barrier”. In the movie, multiple attempts were made to dive from a great height in order to break the sound barrier. Unfortunately, when the plane was close to breaking the barrier, it was too close to the ground and could not pull out of the dive due to the force on the controls. After a couple of crashes, someone finally thinks of reversing the controls so the plane goes with the flow and comes out of the dive in a reverse roll.

That made me think of looking at alternatives when in a tight spot. There is always a way (excuse the unintended pun) to skin a cat. When a painting is not working one way, try another. I have always taught students to think in alternatives. It applies to all things in life and not just art.

In the early seventies, Bill Barrell spent three winters in St Barths in the French West Indies. While there, nature showed him a different way of  seeing and creating art.

Shadow Play #5, photograph, chalk, 1971

….  The idea of going to the Caribbean all came about one summer while having dinner with my friend, Michael Zimmer. He was telling me of how he and his wife Emily had gone to St. Marten for their honeymoon. While there, they had taken a side trip to St. Barths and saw an acre of land for sale on the Bay de St Jean. They bought it. Michael, an architect, had thought maybe of building a house there. He said it was beautiful.

I suggested to him that seeing as neither one of us was locked into any work situation we should do like the birds do and migrate there in the winter. As we both had our summer houses in Maine, it would be the perfect set up.

So.. we plotted and planned for that winter.  Since Michael’s son’s nanny was a certified teacher, we would arm her with teaching materials and take the children too. We studied the Whole Earth Catalogue and planning to sustain ourselves of the earth, we loaded up with seeds.

The locals named the place for us. Le Camp.

I tried painting while living at Le Camp. It did not work. Sailing, swimming, reading and lolling around in the hammock was such a pleasure that painting was saved for Maine. There was always a creative feeling gnawing away at me. When I came by a camera, I decided to try my hand at photography.

Soon my eye turned to the hermit crabs who were living with us. They were helpful little buggers. After dinner, we would put our plates on the ground next to our kitchen. In the night, one could hear them clanking on the plates licking them clean.  (In the morning, of course, we would take the plates down to the sea and rinse them.)

Those little creatures would also move into larger abandoned shells. So I would look for abandoned shells, paint them and place them next to the plates.  So the crabs were often seen sporting new freshly painted houses. It was their thrift shop.

I did a drawing with the crabs. I blocked off about a four by six area in the sand. I dusted the area to make it black, then I rounded up a dozen hermit crabs and released them into the area. They wandered around trailing beautiful lines in the black sand. In the evening, I would sit with a glass of wine and enjoy the art work done while I had been off sailing or swimming.

On my return to Maine in the spring, I would stop in New York City for some cultural input. On one of those stops, I took this photo on the roof of a loft on Mulberry Street. While watching those crabs in St Barths, I had become interested in contrasts so the sharp contrast between the sun and black tar roof caught my eye. It had rained the night before and there was a puddle. The sun was drying it out so I set up a series of ten shots with a half hour between shots.  Every half hour I would line the puddle in white chalk. It made for some beautiful uncontrolled shapes. 

I enjoyed working from nature and learned much from it through the lens of a camera….

Greed fosters bad things, whether it be oil spills or mad cow disease. Bill Barrell contemplates greed and how it brings odd shapes and forms to his paintings…..

Untitled

 -  This painting stems from a period I went through while trying to understand certain aspects of human greed and the Mad Cow Disease. That disease came about from pure greed.  Why was it allowed to happen?

Like the current oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, regulations were ignored in order to save money.

It was a known fact in the 1950s that if cows were fed meat or meat by-products, they would go mad. There is meat and then there are by-products of meat and it was the by-products that caused the problem.  The people who used the brains and spinal cords of slaughtered animals knew full well they should be discarded as this is where the disease resided. But they ignored that fact and thought of the investors and the bottom line. Those by-products also ended up being used in such meats as baloney and hot dogs. I often look at hot dogs and think what a scam. Who knows what goes into them?

Well, none of this is news now. But I was able to vent my spleen by doing a series of mad cow paintings.

This particular painting incorporates me as I felt as angry as the cows.

Is that cow parts I see being fed into my brain via my ear?  Am I changing into a hot dog?  Is this me turning into a spongiform? Am I coming down with the dreaded Mad Cow Disease? I feel as one of them.

I hope that things have changed for the better and that the practice of feeding animal waste to grass and grain eating animals is in the history books. But greed, as we now see with the oil companies being a prime example, will often overcome virtue. -