My Childhood Home 2010

Bo Bartlett made this painting, My Childhood Home, sometime in the last few years, from oil on linen. There is an intriguing contrast between the smooth sky and the rough grass, and the house somewhere in between, kind of how memory works! Bartlett’s touch with the paint is so interesting. It is neither super precise, nor wildly gestural, but somewhere in between. The house has this quiet tension, built up of thin layers, especially in the bricks. What I like about the paint is how it catches on the surface, not shiny, but a really sensual kind of matte. It is like he has built up a real sense of texture there. Look at the way that the paint just builds up on the horizon line, where the roof meets the sky. This piece has a certain feeling of otherworldliness, maybe not unlike some of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings. But it's more than nostalgia, it’s a meditation on time and place. The painting invites us to bring our own stories to the scene, our own half-remembered childhoods.