Tag Archives: Rick Bartow

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Link: Bartow carves a notch in D.C.

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By Bob Hicks

Not too long ago I visited Oregon artist Rick Bartow at his Newport studio and got the lowdown on his latest big project: a pair of 20-foot-tall pole carvings, depicting Raven and Grandmother Bear, that will be installed September 21st outside the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall, just about a block from the White House. Public commissions don’t come a lot more public than this.

Twin poles in the process: Next stop, National Mall. Photo: Laura Grimes
Photo: Laura Grimes

On Friday night I published an essay about it, In the studio: Rick Bartow carves a spot on the National Mall, at Oregon ArtsWatch. Bartow talked about teamwork, community, the value of rolling with the punches, what engineering’s got to do with it, why the carvings are NOT totem poles, and a lot of other stuff. For good measure, he and his folk/blues band, Rick Bartow and the Back Seat Drivers, provided the soundtrack for a Newport Saturday Night.

An excerpt from the essay:

The project’s gone remarkably well, if you discount the numerous design changes, the struggles to align art with engineering for the permanent installation, the steep learning curve, and the occasional flareup of vision problems from Bartow’s unexpected stroke about a year and a half ago. Originally each pole was to feature a big glass disc – sun on one, moon on the other – designed by Bartow’s partner, glass artist Nancy Blair. That changed when Corning Glass scientists looked the plans over and declared that at some point the constant stress of sun, rain and wind would cause the discs to burst. Government engineers, not surprisingly, blanched at the prospect of glass showering over tourists on the mall below.

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Music

Weekend reminder: It’s taiko and Bartow, together again

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pt-fallposter3Portland Taiko is 15 years old, which in people time would mean it’s itching to get a driver’s license but in Arts Group Years means it’s long out of those troublesome teen years and well into its energetic adulthood. Still growing, still learning, but with the assurance that comes with the self-confidence that comes with mastery of key skills.

Plus, that drumming’s really fun.

On Saturday and Sunday Portland Taiko‘s big fall concert, Oregon Lost & Found, will shake the rafters at the Newmark Theatre in downtown Portland (or would, if the Newmark had rafters instead of that cool dome thing on top). Artistic director Michelle Fujii and the full taiko orchestra will be joined onstage by guest performers Ann Ishimaru and Zack Semke, who founded the company, and that should make for a celebratory reunion.

Add the superb visual artist Rick Bartow to the mix and things could really start to fly. Bartow, whose work so often incorporates the image of Coyote, the trickster of Native American lore, will be onstage painting while the drummers play. I’ve watched Rick work in his studio on the Oregon coast — he likes to crank up the boom box while he’s creating — and it’s a fascinating experience. I have high hopes for this show.

Performances are at 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday, with a shorter kids’ show, Taiko Show & Tell, at 1 p.m. Saturday. Tickets online here or at 800-982-2787.

As a PT board member I’ll even be on hand Saturday night and at the Sunday kids’ matinee to give a curtain speech. I promise to keep it short — on with the show! — and to remind you nicely to turn off your cell phones and for god’s sake stop that infernal Twittering.

And maybe you’ll get a chance to pick up a copy of the group’s new CD, Rhythms of Change. I wrote about sitting in on one of the recording sessions way back in April.

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Sticking with a Japanese American theme, I’m intrigued by this notice from Reed College about an upcoming talk by  Linda Gordon called Impounded: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Images of Japanese American Internment.

Throwing the book at internment.It’ll be at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 7, in the college’s Vollum Lecture Hall, and it’s free.

Dorothea Lange was a startlingly good documentary photographer, maybe best-known for her studies of poor rural and small-town people and their lives in the Depression years and later. Apparently her work in Japanese American internment camps was too hot to handle, at least for the government officials who hired her. Her images didn’t show the official-version happy holding tank, and 97 percent of them were never published during those crucial years when they might have made a difference.

In her 2006 book Impounded: Dorothea Lange and Japanese Americans in World War II, Gordon, a professor of history at New York University, and her co-editor, Gary Y. Okihiro,  published and discussed 119 impounded photographs Lange took in the internment camps.

It can take a long, long time. But the truth has a way of eventually sqeaking through the bars of censorship.

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Grace, Falling Like Rain: Rick Bartow, the original story

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Rick Bartow, True Dog. Courtesy FROELICK GALLERYReaders of Laura Grimes’ recent post “Scenes from a writers’ marriage: How he got that story” have noted that the link to the original story by Bob Hicks, which ran on Sunday, March 3, 2002 in The Oregonian, didn’t work. That was a link to the Multnomah County Library version; the story isn’t available on The Oregonian’s Web site, Oregon Live. So here it is, unfortunately without Stephanie Yao’s wonderful photographs that ran with the original.

__________________________

GRACE, FALLING LIKE RAIN

“One thing I hold true is that we’re made up as much of what we’ve lost as of what we’ve gained,” Rick Bartow says, smudging out a streak of pastel crayon with the palm of his hand. “And what is erasing but a metaphor for that?”

A winter rain is snapping against the roof and windows of the Oregon artist’s main studio in South Beach, across the Yaquina Bay bridge from downtown Newport. The little building groans in the wind, which bellows and shrieks and cradles the place, rocking it in a rhythm that is fierce and exhilarating and lulling and somehow timeless. Inside is a cocoon.

Moving quickly and efficiently, Bartow tapes three large sheets of paper side by side by side on the wall. “I’ve tried working on a single sheet,” he says, “and it’s really difficult for me. I have scattered energy, sort of like when I’m talking. I jump all over the place.” He puts a few rough pencil marks on each sheet. Lines, dots, straight, curved. Taking a stick of charcoal in his hand, he flattens his palm and smears a streak of gray against the first sheet. “Just to make damn sure I’m not pussyfooting around,” he says. “I have to do something decisive.” Then he slaps handprints on the other two sheets and smears them around.

He’s just eliminated the Big Empty.

Art has begun.

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General, Journalism, Laura Grimes, Music, Visual Art

Scenes from a writers’ marriage: How he got that story

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Rick Bartow: Crow's Delusion (He Who Must Be Obeyed). Courtesy Froelick Gallery

By LAURA GRIMES

Today my current first husband and I can legally drink. We’ve been married 21 years.

We can’t legally drink and celebrate together because I’m spending our special day with my mom. But it’s not the special days that make a marriage special. It’s the everyday little things. Like laughing and teasing. Like coffee together in the morning.

The first Christmas we spent together, my current first husband gave me a coffee maker. Sweet? I was pissed. But I gotta admit, that coffee maker was our loyal morning friend for 20 years, part of many a happy moment. Good memories are made of many a happy moment. Good marriages, too.

There’s one moment, though, that I will always hold dear.

***

My current first husband wrote a post recently and described a certain look in my eyes. Damn, but he beat me to it. Because little did he know that I have been working on a certain story that has just such a look, albeit a tad bit different and a shade bit farther … and on a certain somebody else. Actually, I’ve been tooling this story around in my head for many years. But a recent event swept through my brain like a tornado in Kansas and collected all the disparate thoughts, lifted them up, swirled them around and plunked them down again.

***

I met Rick Bartow a few weeks ago, and now I understand.

I understand a story I first started hearing years ago.

Rick Bartow. Courtesy Froelick GalleryIt was early 2002. Mr. Scatter and I and the large smelly boys – who were not so large and not so smelly back then – were driving several hours north to visit family. To visit my mom, in fact. The not-so-large not-so-smelly boys must have been blessedly quiet in the backseat for a long stretch of road. We’ll just chalk that up to divinity and not ask why.

Mr. Scatter had recently visited Rick at his home and studio in Newport, Ore., for research to write a story. He had been typing away on it for a few days. But he was at loose ends. I could tell. Because he was talking about it incessantly, as much to figure out a throughway for the story as he was just plum excited.

He was trying to get his arms around a giant octopus and he hadn’t quite figured out how to land it.

***

After meeting Rick and seeing him perform, now I know why. Rick and two of his musician buddies did a show with Portland Taiko on July 2. Mr. Scatter is on the board of Portland Taiko, so even though I was looking forward to finally hearing Rick, I figured it would be an evening of smiling and shaking hands. I fretted about taking the right handbag.

It had been a blistering hot day and the event was taking place on the roof of the DeSoto Building in the Pearl, above Froelick Gallery. Frying came to mind. But by evening, the temperature had cooled to balmy, a slight breeze had kicked in and the sky was an uncanny even blue, deepening darker as the night wore on and lending a crisper backdrop for a half moon that lifted and slowly shifted through the show. It was magic.

Rick was even better. He was immediately open and generous, a magnetic guy who took a blues song and elevatored it down to deep dark basements faster than you can push a button. His songs were earthy and mystical and wrapped in rich, complex storytelling. He didn’t hold back.

What a gift. He talked of his past substance abuse, Vietnam, friends who have died, the beginnings of songs, the ends of songs. He wasn’t afraid of ugly. And he wasn’t afraid of sweet.

His stories unspooled for anyone lucky enough to have a seat. Friends. Strangers. He opened up for everyone. It was the gift he gave.

Afterward, Mr. Scatter and I chatted with him. I asked if he ever played at the Blues Festival, which was happening at the same time at Tom McCall Waterfront Park. He said no, he just can’t take the crowds. His nerves get to him.

I understand that, too. He seemingly wears all of his nerves on the outside. He takes in everything, absorbs it, feels it, and gives it back. For someone to perform like that, he must be perceptive to the slightest vibrations. And when you’re that sensitive, when all your pores are open to everything that comes in, crowds can be overwhelming. It’s too much all at once. There’s a lot of good in there, but the bad comes with it.

I want to say that Rick is a big man, but that doesn’t sound right. He’s a big spirit. At once gentle and rough.

Continue reading Scenes from a writers’ marriage: How he got that story →