Where Did All That Life Go 2020

Bo Bartlett made this painting, "Where Did All That Life Go," with oil on canvas, and I’m immediately struck by its strange beauty, its slightly unsettling combination of the grotesque and the serene. There’s a tension between the smooth, almost classical rendering of the shark's form and the rawness of its exposed flesh. The pinks and blues of the sky are echoed in the shark's body, creating a kind of harmony, but then you see where the head has been cut off. Notice the texture, how the paint is applied thinly, almost like watercolor, in some areas, allowing the canvas to breathe. The dark, almost bruised reds of the exposed flesh are painted with a different kind of attention. This contrast reminds me a bit of Chaim Soutine's paintings of carcasses, where the visceral reality of death is rendered with a kind of ecstatic, almost celebratory brushwork. It’s the kind of painting that gets under your skin, that lingers in your mind long after you've walked away, asking uncomfortable questions about life, death, and our relationship to the natural world.