Variations of Masters

My entire life I have been obsessed with shapes. I know not whether I was born with this fixation or if it just quickly overcame me from my beginnings. My obsession with spatial relationships borders upon the pathological. It simply dominates my existence. In my parents’ car, as a child, I would think about the shapes of trees and the placement and the arrangement of bushes or houses on the lots we drove past or the spacing or shapes of the clouds within the sky. I was fascinated by where a dog would sit in his yard in relation to the objects around him and I would trace the growth of tree branches in my mind as they stretched out into the sky about them. A tree’s shape and structure made perfect sense to me, not botanically but sculpturally. I was always blissfully unaware of street signs or traditional landmarks. I would just marvel at the evolving composition which scrolled across my little window and the multitudes of shapes and spatial relationships that played before my eyes. My father would tease me and say “If I dropped you off right here you would have no idea how to get home” even if we were less than a mile from our house. He was right. I have traversed through this existence staring at, marveling upon, and re-imagining how objects, lines, and shapes play upon one another. This impulse or obsession to view, judge, measure and manipulate compositional arrangements around me has dominated my existence for as long as I can remember. When I look upon an arrangement of shapes I see an inter-connecting array of lines which forms the framework of an invisible composition that plays within my mind. It is how I artistically or instinctively know where one form or shape should be in relation to another or within a grouping of others. These compulsions dictate the arrangement of my possessions and furniture within my home not because there is a place for everything and everything in its place but because all objects visually speak with each other and speak to me telling me where they belong. This impulse is so overpowering it even dictates which can of spinach or jar of peanut butter I choose from the grocery store shelf based on its spatial relationship with the other containers and shelves surrounding them.

I pored over my parents’ collection of Time Life books on art and pondered their wondrous compositions and shapes. I cared not about the subjects of the paintings I saw in these magical books but only about how the artists had arranged and manipulated the objects within the rectangular confinement of their frames. It mattered little to me if the objects were nude women or apples; I just wanted to stare at and contemplate upon the array of invisible lines tying and anchoring these shapes together into a glorious composition of visual tension and beauty. I could not be anything but an artist.

I began drawing by the age of three and by five and six I had developed the ability to draw what I could see. Popeye the Sailor Man was one of the first truly competent representational objects I ever drew. I would manipulate his form and pose and I relished in the feeling that I had captured his likeness and now owned the figure of my favorite sailor. It was not a feeling of control or power, it was as if what I had just created was somehow now intimately connected to my world, that it had become part of me. This feeling, to this day, still returns when I successfully portray an image before me.  The first true painting I created, at the age of eleven and in the spirit of reverence to the masters I studied within my books, was a man with a Van Dyke beard and a blue hat in the manner of Rembrandt. The second painting I created was the head of Jesus in the manner of El Greco. My artistic career path pretty much derailed from that point on.

I, of course, continued to draw and paint throughout the remainder of my middle and then high school years but never considered or sought out any particular outlet or direction for what I was creating. My parents were supportive of what they considered my “hobby” but never imagined art as a career. Being from a small midwestern town and before the dawn of the digital age, I also never considered becoming a professional artist. I knew no one besides myself who was an artist and took only one art class in high school, a ceramics class. I was on a college preparatory schedule taking honors english and advanced math. It just did not occur to me that being an artist was an acceptable course to follow. I had never met a professional artist before and the artists’ works whom I studied were dead and gone decades or even centuries before my birth. I even chose my university, my first university, based upon where my high school girlfriend at the time had intended to go.

In college my life began to fall apart. I was painting all the time and selling my first works but becoming more and more disillusioned with the idea of degree, job, marriage and kids that everyone I encountered was chasing. That life seemed like a long boring train with a mortuary as its last destination. I dropped out after a year and a half and joined the military, the Coast Guard, for it seemed the least violent of all the armed forces. In the military I painted with a ferocity. By my third year I was creating over forty paintings a year while still fulfilling my duties to The Captain of the Port in New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that I first began to publicly show my works, first in bars and clubs and eventually in small galleries. When my active duty ended I returned home and to art school in Cincinnati. Since I was already exhibiting and selling my paintings, I decided upon a degree in ceramic sculpture for I wanted no one to tell me how to paint. The two painting classes I did take left me deeply disappointed. It seemed no one was actually teaching anyone “how” to paint. The classes in general spent a great deal of time discussing and critiquing the work but spent little time focusing on how to create better art and the methods and techniques of all of the artists who came before us. The projects assigned were so technically simplistic that ninety percent of the work I made was done outside of class and curriculum. I marveled at how little art many of my fellow students created on their own outside of assignments. 

After graduation I continued on, showing and selling my works wherever and to whomever I could manage, working in restaurants to pay my rent. I am a self-trained painter and I scoured every used bookstore in town to find books about the masters and the techniques they used. But very few offered concrete examples of craft but were treatises on subject matter, style, and how the artists fit into the history of western art. This was before the age of the internet truly took hold. There were no thousands upon thousands of “how to” videos, blogs, and articles available within minutes of searching. My growth was steady but slow and many things I learned occurred by happenstance. At this time I was exhibiting continuously and selling a great deal of work, but I had no connections. My shows were in student or independent run galleries, bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and even a hair salon. My friends were just starting their careers and I knew of no one with any real income to buy my work at prices to afford me a livable income. I approached larger galleries in multiple cities but was rebuffed, sometimes because of my age butmainly because of, what seemed to me, an odd desire to discover new talent only on their own. When I brought slides to a gallery in San Francisco they told me they only accepted tapes (VHS). Another gallery told me they only they only accepted slides when I presented them with a tape. I took a tape, slides, and prints of my work in a self-addressed stamped envelope to a gallery in New York and I was told they only accepted work in the mail and turned me away. A receptionist in a gallery in Chicago was far more blunt. She told me, “We do not want artists approaching us in any way.” While in art school a local gallery owner spoke to a seniors art thesis class I was taking. Before she began her talk and the slideshow of artists from her gallery, she stated “I represent no none under the age of fifty-five.” This was to ensure that none of us lowly art students might approach her after class. In my own city I met a designer who loved my work but when she handed my portfolio to the director of the gallery it went unopened and unexamined. The director first asked my age and then simply handed it back to the designer and said, “Have him come back in twenty years.” 

I became a teacher. I continued to sell and exhibit, at first, but found myself working less and less as I poured my creativity into the classroom and the elaborate lesson plans and examples I created for my students. I put everything I was into the craft of my pedagogy and it consumed my time, my personal life, and my art. But through teaching art I rediscovered my love of the masters. I taught straight up, hardcore techniques to my children. I taught them accurate representational drawing, colour theory, and advanced layering and brushwork techniques. And from it all I began to realize that my own technical skills were growing again. I began to copy and work from masterpieces again, as I had done as a child. I talked the talk and walked the walk and demonstrated to my students, and myself, that through discipline, practice, and application that they, and myself, could obtain remarkable results.  

I began to create pieces based upon my favorite masterpieces. I painted one of my first students in the pose of the “Girl with the Pearl Earring” by Vermeer. I created a Degas for my mother and a Vermeer for my father. I taught myself cubism and discovered how to teach it to others. I remade the face of the “Mona Lisa” in 6,912 half inch squares with a little square brush I had created. I inserted myself into Gustave Caillebotte’s “The Floor Scrapers” as one of the workers and did my own versions of Shepard Fairey pieces and a variation on M.C. Escher’s “Drawing Hands” to reflect my views on infinity and my interest in physics and the nature of reality. In essence I had returned to what had attracted me to painting as a child in the first place, when I pored over the works of the masters in my parents books and internalized and digested their compositions and shapes and what had led me to attempt to paint in the manner of Rembrandt and El Greco. My art, what mattered to me most about art and the direction my work would take, all seemed to crystalize within my mind. My work had always been creative, it reflected skill and thought and no matter what subject I had painted or sculpted, my ownindividual style or manner shown through. But it was disorganized. I experimented a lot. Besides straightforward portraiture and figure studies, I created images from my imagination and dreams. I even made three dimensional paintings out of birch wood which I fashioned with a Japanese hacksaw that would change based upon the viewer’s position. I experimented with making marks on treated canvases with fire and smoke and made paintings that illustrated intricate details of my personal philosophies. But this was different. This was new. This was an organized and systematic approach to re-imagining my favorite paintings of western art as I saw them and as how I desired them to be, and I would take ownership over their shapes ands forms just as I had done with Popeye when I was six years old. And it would require me to study and learn methods and techniques of the masters and to explore my craft and push myself harder than I had never done before. 

But work was slow with how much time I was still devoting to teaching. As I was beginning a variation of the “Mona Lisa” with a different background and a variation of a John Singer Sargent double portrait I began to realize that I would never have the time to explore the explosion of ideas and themes I now possessed. I realized that never in my life had I solely focused on my creations. I was always a full time student, or Marine Science Technician, or server, or teacher. I needed to be only an artist for the first time in my life. This would encompass my entire existence.

I am now, with all of the time at my disposal, recreating my favorite paintings from my favorite artists with sometimes subtle or sometimes quite dramatic alterations. Copying, borrowing, and altering other artists’ works might seem quite irregular but it is actually the most natural thing in the world. 

Rarely has any single work of art been truly original. There is no visual vacuum for images and forms to evolve independently from foreign influences. Cultures and individual artists have adopted, borrowed, and stolen from the cultures and the artists preceding and surrounding them. Western art evolved neither geographically independent of outside influences nor through some technological superiority of its own culture compared to that of its neighbors. Greek art can be traced through its influences of the Minoan, Mycenaean, and Egyptian cultures. Once the Hellenistic culture had truly developed as a singular and unique art form, the Romans simply came along and completely and utterly hijacked it. Athens and then Rome’s assimilation and appropriation of neighboring cultures’ artistic endeavors set the stage for a cross-creative commingling free-for-all in Europe for the next two thousand years. From this point on Western Art became a game of imitation and emulation. Isolated or purely original development was out the window, so to speak.

The traditional education of a classically trained Western artist required copying and imitating the art and styles of the masters who came before them. When possible they would work in the studios of established artists to learn to paint or sculpt from the master or even (and usually) contribute to actual works by the master himself or even fabricate entire works in the master’s name. Leonardo da Vinci apprenticed in Andrea del Verrocchio’s studio and even surpassed the skill of his teacher when he collaborated with the master on his painting “The Baptism of Christ.” Most artists known to the public trained this way, through individual masters or schools or academies. Michelangelo studied with Ghirlandaio before being sent to the palace of the Medicis to further study and train. Michelangelo, like all renaissance artists, drew from the masters before him and made detailed copies, often with minor variations of his own, of figures from the works of Giotto and Masaccio. Rubens, while in Italy, studied and drew from the works of Leonardo, Raphael, and Caravaggio. It is only from these sketches that we know what Leonardo’s “Battle at Anghiari” and Michelangelo’s lost Hercules statue look like. He made countless studies of Michelangelo works, even re-drawing his “Creation of Adam” with minor modifications. It was a drawing by Raphael, made while visiting Leonarod’s studio, which shows what might be a second Mona Lisa. Vincent Van Gogh made more than thirty copies of artists he admired with twenty-one of them being copies of Jean Francois Millet. Artists have studied, copied, and recreated the works of the masters around and before them and have done so for centuries. Goethe said to Eckermann, “If you see a great master, you will always find that he used what was good in his predecessors, and that it was this which made him great.”

Artists have also continuously borrowed poses and compositions from the painters who came before them. Manet’s famous and controversial “Olympia” was based on the pose from Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” who in turn had based his model’s pose on Giorgione’s “Sleeping Venus.” Rembrandt’s pose in his “Self-Portrait at the Age of 34” was taken directly from Titian’s “A Man with a Quilted Sleeve.” Ingres drew his pose for “Grande Odalisque” directly from Jacques-Louis David’s “Portrait of Madame Recamier” finished just five years before his own. It is almost impossible find a pose in a Ruben’s painting that cannot somehow be traced back to the pose of a figure from a work by Michelangelo. Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa and renamed it L.H.O.O.Q. as a pun for sexual restlessness, the ultimate in compositional acquisition. But none of these acts of borrowing were dishonest. Dizzy Gillespie said of Charlie Parker, “You can’t steal a gift. Bird gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.” 

Edgar Degas painted “Variation on Velazquez’s Las Meninas” after Diego Velazquez’s great masterpiece. Goya etched his own copy of the work. Manolo Valdes Created outdoor sculptures based upon the work. Dozens of artists have copied his composition in drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography. Pablo Picasso, in fact, spent an entire year creating fifty-eight different paintings based solely on Velazquez’s masterpiece. He created works focusing just on the young Infanta Margaret Theresa and versions where the entire work is re-imagined. Picasso said of this “If someone wants to copy “Las Meninas”, entirely in good faith, for example, upon reaching a certain point and if that one was me, I would say...what if you put them a little more to the right or left? I’ll try to do it my way, forgetting about Velazquez. The test would surely bring me to modify or change the light because of having changed the position of a character. So, little by little, that would be a detestable Meninas for a traditional painter, but would be my Meninas.” Picasso was not just copying Velazquez, he was creating his own Velazquez. These artists are not thieves or forgers. They took what came before them and used it to build upon. They have appropriated this painting’s shapes and composition for their own devices. And in recreating it, or capturing it as they saw fit they have created their own masterpiece and have taken its possession. Of course it is sexier to describe it as theft. Picasso famously stated “Bad artists copy, good artists steal.” And Igor Stravinsky, in reference to the music of Webern said “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”

My interpretations of the masters, which I refer to as variations, break down into four distinctive categories based upon how I feel or react to the artist and the masterpiece in question. I almost always maintain the basic spatial arrangement of the composition for this is what inherently attracts me to the work in the first place. Sometimes all I do is exchange certain elements from the original for elements that convey some sort of relevance or importance to myself. For my “Alice in Wonderland”(fig.1) it is a painted version of the original illustration by John Tenniel which graced my childhood copy of the book. I inserted a child I knew from teaching and the only other variations were minor elements slightly emphasized or eliminated. It is not just the structure of the composition but also the nature of the novel which speaks to me. For Vermeer’s “The Artist’s Studio”(fig.2) I changed the model to a woman whom I had met and then inserted various elements from my own life which hold meaning for me. His table became the table I paint with, the chair and washstand became the ones from my home, and it is my Guy Fawkes mask and my sculpture on the table, along with other details and objects from my life, that I have placed within the work. In the background I painted a tiny version of my Alice painting. For my version of Vermeer’s “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher”(fig.3) I used his figure and his wonderful pitcher and basin but altered all of the elements around them. The stained glass window is one my mother made, the framed drawing is one I had done in the manner of Picasso, and the tablecloth is decorated with the faces of Marvel’s Avengers. I even changed the chair finial from a lion to a tiny Harry Potter head. In works like these I have kept my favorite original elements and added or exchanged elements of my own to reflect myself and my interests. Overall the composition remains much the same as the original. Am I a thief? To quote Jim Jarmusch “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.” My paintings are compositional exercises in the addition of me and the subtraction of what is not. I decide which of the original elements remain based upon the pictorial and emotional requirements of the new picture as it is developing. Picasso once said “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.” I believe art is “also” but not entirely the elimination of the unnecessary. Sometimes you need a little icing on that cake.

In other paintings I have taken the pose from a work I admire and recreated an entirely new environment for the figure to inhabit. In my version of Ingres’ “The Valpincon Bather” which I named "La Grande Baigneuse"(fig.4) I posed my model as the original but every element has been exchanged. It is my bed upon which she sits and my nightstand and sculptures. The hanging curtain has been replaced by the edge of the door frame. My painting is more “in reference” to the original. In my “Cleopatra”(fig.5) painting I have utilized the pose of Gustave Klimt’s “Judith” but have completely reconstructed the environment about her. I have used Elizabeth Taylor as my subject and her hand rests upon a bust of Gaius Julius Caesar. On her collar is written the word Eros in ancient greek. The entire backround was created to resemble Klimt’s but to also echo the theme of Egypt and her dress has been reworked to include images reflective of an asp. The band across the top is an allusion to an old time movie theater curtain and the work is also my reference to the 1963 motion picture Cleopatra in which she starred. In paintings like these I have mainly just borrowed poses. They are inherently no different from what Manet did with his “Olympia.” Louis Armstrong once said “My hobbie (one of them anyway)…is using a lot of scotch tape… My hobbie is to pick out different things during what I read and piece them together and make a little story of my own.” My variations are stories about me.

I have also created works in the manner of a particular artist but without borrowing a figure’s pose or from the imagery of an actual painting. My “Wonder Woman”(fig.6) is actually an exercise in colour theory but looks like an Andy Warhol. In another piece also with the subject of Wonder Woman, titled “Dianne and her Jet,”(fig.7) I have done a work similar in nature to a Roy Lichtenstein piece but not based on any singular painting of his. I have utilized facial features similar to paintings of his and Ben-Day dots adorn the flesh to create a work “like” a Lichtenstein but you will not find one compositionally similar. My cubist “Bette Davis Eyes”(fig.8) is in the manner of cubism but is actually my own style of cubism that I had developed over the years and also relates to my next series of variations. 

In my work such as “The Libyan Sibyl”(fig.9) I have reconstructed the composition of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling figure with the spatial arrangement and lines of tension which I see, and have always seen, when I look upon an arrangement of shapes. To put it simply, my version of his Sibyl is an illustrated example of how I see spacial relationships in this world. When I look upon an arrangement of shapes I see an inter-connecting array of lines which forms the framework of an invisible composition that plays within my mind. It is how I artistically or instinctively know where one form or shape should be in relation to another or within a grouping of others. When I draw or paint or sculpt, these guidelines or spatial yearnings guide my eye and hand to produce whatever line or shape I will ultimately find pleasing. I am illuminating the nature of how I see shapes and form by superimposing these relationships I am aware of on top of the original composition. My “The Next Supper,”(fig.10) my “Bam! Superman vs. Shazam”(fig.11) from my love of Alex Ross and “Harmony in Red and Green”(fig.12) from Ingres’ “The Virgin of the Lilies” are all examples of this method or treatment or transformation. I believe that these works are a culmination of years of study and practice attempting to understand the abstraction and arrangement of shape and form which enslaves my very mind. 

What I am doing is no different than what Manet did with Titian, Picasso with Velazquez,  Rubens with Michelangelo, or what Van Gogh did with Millet. Picasso’s year long analyzation of “Las Meninas” comes closest to what I have embarked upon. But instead of one work I am analyzing a catalog of my own “who’s who” from western art. They are a collection of the works which have spoken to me over my lifetime and have dominated my thoughts for my entire life. They are my homage to what has come before me and a statement about who I am and what I shall become. These paintings are a visual explanation of who and what I am as an artist and as a person. My works are a documentation of how I artistically arrived to this point, the works span over fifteen years and illustrate my growth in craft and vision. As a whole I believe this is what sets my undertaking apart from the traditions of the past. They are not just an isolated copy or reference, or even an exhaustive study of one singular masterpiece. The works are a collection unto themselves. No one piece stands alone and apart from the others. Sometimes directly referencing one another, they support each other and they enrich the nature of every other individual piece and reinforce the quality and the impact of the group as a whole. Throughout and within each other they build a singular and evolving aesthetic. I cannot look upon one without thinking about the others. They are interconnected amongst themselves and they are intimately and materially connected to me. They go beyond my life’s work. They are my children. I cannot separate myself from this collection of shapes. They are not just my creations, they are me.

Gregory Barrett

Show Proposal:

It is my goal to exhibit my current and ever expanding collection of masterpiece variations in a public spaces multiple times. During the duration of the exhibit it is my intention to be, on a daily basis, onsite to create a new work from start to finish to illustrate my methods and thought and style of creation to both inform and entertain the viewers who have come to visit the show. I have found that when friends or clients are visiting my studio they are often just as intrigued by a work in progress as they are by the finished pieces. I, myself, am fascinated by the process of any artist or craftsman and I believe this will create an educational, creative, and unique environment for any patron visiting the show. It will be like a really slow piece of performance art:)

Gregory Barrett

Please feel free to contact me at: cabinetonfire@gmail.com