Bartlett bought this jacket at the Army supply store Ranger Joes when it was located in the downtown district of his hometown of Columbus, Georgia, just two blocks away from where The Bo Bartlett Center is now housed. The young aspiring artist had recently graduated from Brookstone School and was leaving for Florence to study…
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Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, Bartlett utilized film photography stills to help with the positioning of models for his paintings. In the preparatory stages of a painting, work began by completing compositional studies. Then the artist would have the models pose while he drew finished charcoal and graphite studies from life. A preliminary color study…
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Vernacular architecture is an important subject in Bo Bartlett’s painting and none is more important that the southern suburban single house. For him the single house becomes both a metaphor for place and home, as well as an archetypal form that he constantly revisits in his sketchbooks and paintings. This page, from one of his…
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Bartlett had a few models wear this hat for studies for the painting, but was not satisfied until a well-known American wood worker’s daughter, Mira Nakashima, was introduced to the artist and wore it. After finding the right figures for this painting Bartlett had two models wear robes on the Delaware River, near the…
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Originally mastered by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo during the growth of arts and sciences in the High Renaissance, anatomical drawings became crucial in creating a more lifelike, sculptural portrayal of the human figure. This importance resonated in Thomas Eakins. After becoming President of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Eakins did away with plaster cast models and…
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1994 Oil on linen 134 x 204 So in 1994, when I was in Swedesburg, I was going to do a whole series of war paintings. I didn’t want to do war paintings glorifying war; rather, I wanted to do paintings from the point of view of the feminine–the solution to war. A peaceful, non-violent…
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