Bill Barrett is known primarily as a sculptor, but he also produces paintings. After surviving cancer in the 1990s, Barrett turned to painting as a healing process. His Concerto Series consists of over 25 vibrant and playful abstract paintings created through an improvisational process. Barrett begins with doodling and spontaneous marks, then builds up layers of color, achieving a state of balanced movement. The paintings celebrate Barrett's philosophy of joy and enthusiasm for life.

1. Unbridled Joy: Recent Paintings by Bill Barrett
©David S. Rubin
Throughout most of his long and distinguished career, Bill Barrett has been considered primarily
a sculptor. The title of his 2003 monograph by Philip F. Palmedo, in fact, is Bill Barrett: Evolution of a
Sculptor. Yet, a practice common to artists working today is to move back and forth among various
mediums, and Barrett's approach is no exception. The son of a painter who studied under the
pioneering cubist Fernand Léger, Barrett watched his father paint in the studio as a child, and he himself
explored the medium in his student years. Additionally, many of Barrett's favorite twentieth century
artists, including Arshile Gorky and Willem DeKooning, were painters. So the fact that Barrett would
himself shift his main focus from the three-dimensional medium of sculpture to the two-dimensional
format of painting is not all that surprising.
Nonetheless, such a move was actually spawned by a life-changing crisis. In the early 1990s,
Barrett was diagnosed with cancer of the thymus and of one of his kidneys. After two successful
surgeries that left him cancer-free, the artist felt that he had been given a reprieve from what he
thought was to be his demise. As part of the process of reinvigorating himself, he turned to painting,
which proved to be uplifting and healing. Over the past two decades, while never abandoning sculpture
entirely, Barrett has developed a considerable body of paintings that beautifully characterize his outlook
on life, which is optimistic, joyful, and celebratory. His Concerto Series, which consists of more than 25
paintings to date, is both exuberant and playful, and much like a composer or a conductor, Barrett is the
master orchestrator of the compositions. Yet unlike most music, Barrett's paintings have no score.
Rather than work from a predetermined plan, he prefers instead to use an improvisational approach
that he has also applied over the years to making sculpture. For Barrett, artmaking is a matter of being
inspired, engaging fully in the process, and knowing how to recognize when a work has reached its
expressive potential.
The generic term for Barrett's process, 'automatism', was very much in circulation during the
period when Barrett was emerging as a young artist. A term that has been used to refer to both writing
and visual art, it was commonly used in the 19th century, when automatic writing and drawing were
what was done is séances led by mediums. By the 1920s, artists and writers interested in psychology
believed that automatic words and images emerged from tapping the unconscious, both the personal
and the collective and, in founding Surrealism, André Breton defined 'Surrealism' as "pure psychic
automatism." Essentially, practicing automatism is to work with little preconception of what one will
create, with heavy reliance upon intuitive impulse. For many automatists, the process can be very lyrical
and rhythmic, like a dance of sorts. Indeed, this may be what the late curator and critic William Rubin
had in mind when he described Jackson Pollock's creative process as automatism of the body.i
Whether embarking on a sculpture or a painting, Barrett likes to begin with what he calls
"doodling," the same term used by Robert Motherwell for the automatic drawings that led to his
renowned Spanish Elegies series, which he considered to come from "doodling on the scale of the
Sistine ceiling."ii
Motherwell, many of his peers, and multitudes of artists working since the 1950s have

2. placed high value on the authenticity of their spontaneous notations. As starting points for something
more ambitious, these "thought forms" (to borrow a phrase popularized by Wassily Kandinsky) can
come in mighty handy, as they are the seeds of potential from which the artist can develop something of
greater magnitude or substance.
Barrett's earliest use of a doodling approach to making sculpture dates to the early 1970s, when
he was living on the Bowery in New York City and hanging out at Max's Kansas City, a popular club
frequented by artists, musicians, writers, and art world celebrities. On one occasion, while having a
drink at the bar, Barrett spontaneously started twisting and bending a swizzle stick, only to discover
triangular shapes that he realized would be ideal configurations for larger sculptures. As a result of this
experience, he began manipulating sticks coated with wax as a means of producing shapes to be
translated into sculptures. By the 1980s, Barrett developed a process, which he continues to use today,
that allows him to be free and spontaneous in developing a sculpture. To begin, the artist draws freely
into the surface of an almost-hard layer of molten wax that he has poured into a baking pan. Using a
thin wooden skewer, he quickly sketches out a composition that resembles a simple jigsaw puzzle. He
then extracts the puzzle pieces and shapes them by twisting and bending, as he had done earlier with
the swizzle sticks. Next, the individual pieces are joined together to become maquettes cast in bronze.
Larger versions of the models are then fabricated using sizable sheets of bronze, and welded together to
create rhythmic sculptures characterized by undulating calligraphic movements.
To make a painting, Barrett employs a similar process, and begins with spontaneous scribbles.
He next steps back to observe his automatic composition, in order to identify shapes and forms that
interest him. Returning to spontaneous mode, Barrett then starts painting additively, usually with grays
applied first. What follows is a process of layering various colors, pulling disparate parts together with
black, and locking everything into place with white. In creating many of the larger paintings, he is now
using digital technology, a practice that has become prevalent among contemporary painters. Barrett's
approach is to photograph a work-in-progress, upload the image to a computer, print it enlarged on
canvas, and continue painting over the enlargement. For Barrett, the painting process is itself a kind of
performance, with the final act being the filling in of the backgrounds. Working on several paintings
simultaneously, the process can take from two to three months.
Evidence of Barrett's rhythmic approach to artmaking is ever present in the vibrancy of the
swirling undulations of the elements in his sculptures and paintings. It is what Bernard H. Friedman, in
titling his biography of Jackson Pollock, referred to as "energy made visible."iii
In Barrett's sculpture Élan
(2004), this energy moves gracefully through sinuous ribbons of bronze that suggest the various body
positions of a ballet dancer. Introduced to classical music at an early age, Barrett would often
accompany his mother (who played piano and harp) to concerts. As an adult, he fell in love with
classical ballet, and attended performances often while living in New York City. Barrett's musical
interests, however, extend beyond the classical, as more modern forms of music and dance have also
influenced many of his sculptures. Over the years, he has titled some of these after popular dances such
as the Jitterbug, the Tango, and the Slide Step. And, although commissioned and named for a niche in a
collector's home, Niche Pair Sculptures (2013) is composed of two animated biomorphs that could easily
be imagined as moving and grooving to that good time rock-and-roll.

3. A more frenetic kind of energy is present in Pinnacle VI (2007), one of several sculptures that
Barrett created in memory of the victims of 9/11. With his New York studio situated only ten blocks
from ground zero, Barrett witnessed the tragedy firsthand, and was deeply affected by it. In his
Pinnacle sculptures, turbulent undulations that dominate the upper sections of the works refer to the
violent destruction of the towers. They could be interpreted as combusting flames, crumbling
architecture, or victims leaping from the buildings. While potent with symbolism, the Pinnacle series
also reveals Barrett's mastery of unifying dualities by bringing opposing forces into balance. In Pinnacle
VI, for example, there is a perfect reconciliation between organic and geometric form, as well as
between motion and stasis.
In developing monochromatic sculptures like those of Barrett, the intuitive process of achieving
harmonious states of balance is largely a matter of thinking in-the-round, of responding intuitively to
twists and turns within physical space. In painting with many colors, however, this process involves a
different set of challenges. Working with an abstract vocabulary on a two-dimensional surface, how
does one achieve something that appears convincingly three-dimensional without imitating nature?
Whatever it is, it must create its own space and appear to have its own inherent logic. And with many
colors coming into play, the balancing act shifts from being a matter of simple duality, to encompassing
an entire community of forces and counter-forces.
In his painted works, Barrett employs a pictorial style that he began using in the early 1990s
which, as he has acknowledged, owes a debt to the early abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky, as well as to
the biomorphic imagery of Surrealist painters such as Joan Miró, Roberto Matta Echaurren, and
especially Arshile Gorky. Additionally, a number of Barrett's painted images have been based loosely on
his sculptures, with early examples resembling abstract still lives characterized by a clear separation of
figure and ground. By the late 1990s, however, Barrett's painted compositions became more animated,
with large gestural forms dominating and flattening the pictorial space to some extent, therein revealing
a closer kinship with the late paintings of Willem DeKooning. Yet unlike DeKooning's painted gestures,
Barrett's markings are whimsical and cartoonlike, an effect that is achieved by outlining them in black.
Historically, this device has been used in paintings by such diverse artists as William Cply, Roy
Lichtenstein, and Philip Guston.
In the Concerto Series (2015), Barrett presents a range of individual compositions, each a
unique latticework of undulating ribbons that fill open amorphous spaces. Rather than appear
gravitationally anchored, these joyful forms seem to float within sections of a boundless universe. For
the viewer, there are many pathways to travel as our eyes move across the painted ribbons, and there is
never a single resting point. Every part of a painting, in other words, is alive and breathing in a state of
continual movement and flux. To achieve this animated presence, which Barrett has termed a "life-
spark,"iv
the artist must successfully bring all the elements into a kind of aesthetic harmony such that no
single entity can be too dominant. In Concerto Series #1, one of the first completed paintings of the
series, this kind of equilibrium may be observed in the roughly even distribution of the colors red, blue,
ochre, and purple, which play off one another rhythmically and, as a group, serve as an equally weighted
counterpoint to the similarly equitable positioning of gray, black, and white. Adding to the energetic
interaction of these features is the contrast between the solid opacity of the swirling clusters and the

4. softer and more transparent quality of the field.
As the Concerto Series progressed, Barrett's language of joyful energy became increasingly
elastic and complex. As he dove further into the choreography of his process, Barrett introduced a
number of surprising moves that add to the uniqueness of each individual painting. In Concerto Series
#3, for example, abstraction evolved into representation in the lower left and upper right corners,
where we find open views of cloud-filled skies that lend a playful incongruity to the work. In Concerto
Series #10, the central and frontmost element of the composition is the self-referential swizzle stick,
shown bent to form a triangle like the one that marked a turning point in the evolution of the artist's
process. In Concerto Series #11, there is an emphasis on upward movement, with the central coils of the
composition acting like the torque of a cyclone that lifts a black geometric structure to the top of the
painting, bringing to mind Dorothy's house on its way to Oz. In Concerto Series #17, a human torso and
head, abstracted in red, is adoringly crowned and embraced by white squiggles. And in Concerto Series
#25, a golden light fills the background, conveying a warm and radiant sensation.
As vehicles for emotional expression, the paintings in the Concerto Series perpetuate the joie de
vivre philosophy that was advocated by Henri Matisse, and do so using a maximalist vocabulary that
lends itself well to a number of different subjects. Manhattan Overview and Santa Fe Suite, for
example, may be considered abstract landscapes that celebrate Barrett's personal tale of two cities, as
he currently maintains residencies in both New York City and Santa Fe, New Mexico. In Manhattan
Overview, the structure of Barrett's clustered mass is tight and contained, with swirls and bands
intertwined and congested in reference to the buildings and people on the island of Manhattan. By
contrast, Santa Fe Suite is expansive and airy, with earthy colors at the bottom, blue sky and white
clouds at top, and a bustling polychromatic abstraction in the middle.
In another recent painting, Tintin's Adventures (2015), Barrett pays homage to a favorite comic
book character, as well as to the clean, linear graphic style of the comic book genre. One of the most
beloved fictional characters of twentieth century popular culture, Tintin was created in 1929 by the
Belgian cartoonist Helgé (born Georges Remi). An investigative news reporter turned detective, Tintin
traveled the globe with his faithful dog Snowy to champion social causes and support the world's
underdogs. Like the invincible Don Quixote, a fictional persona honored by Barrett in several of his
sculptures, Tintin has come to personify the determination of the human spirit to overcome obstacles
and chase after dreams and aspirations. Such élan, such enthusiasm for life and belief in possibility, is
the essentially humanistic outlook that Barrett so joyfully celebrates in his paintings.

5. i
William S. Rubin, "Notes on Masson and Pollock," Arts, XXXIV/2, November, 1959, p. 43.
ii
Robert Motherwell, conversation with the author, Greenwich, Ct., January 6, 1977.
iii
Bernard H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972).
iv
Bill Barrett, quoted in Polyphonic Abstraction: Paintings and Maquettes by Bill Barrett (Ames, Iowa: Christian Petersen
Art Museum, Iowa State University, 2010).

6. i
William S. Rubin, "Notes on Masson and Pollock," Arts, XXXIV/2, November, 1959, p. 43.
ii
Robert Motherwell, conversation with the author, Greenwich, Ct., January 6, 1977.
iii
Bernard H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972).
iv
Bill Barrett, quoted in Polyphonic Abstraction: Paintings and Maquettes by Bill Barrett (Ames, Iowa: Christian Petersen
Art Museum, Iowa State University, 2010).