“About five years ago I got tired of being in the studio all the time,” says Tom Barnes. “I thought, what do I like to do? I like to drink, I like to draw and I like women. I wondered, how do we put all these together?”
Voila. He began taking sketchbooks to the Comet on Capitol Hill. He’d sit by a window and draw passersby and patrons for hours on end. Tonight Barnes has his first show in a decade, displaying five year of sketches in all their lewd, lush, bizarre glory.
Hung at Steve Gilbert’s photography studio just upstairs from Perkins Glass on Broadway and Pike, the exhibit features dozens of drawings, paintings on canvas and endless smaller paintings torn from Barnes’ sketchbooks. The work is more than a little mad. The subjects—nearly all women—are messy and sexy. Blood-red, smeary pouts melt into faces with heavily-colored lids. They stare you down, at turns glowering or smoldering or gazing with insouciant, button eyes. They’re imbued with the same almost-violent, grotesque sensibility of interwar-era German painters like George Grosz or Otto Dix. Ballpoint pen scribbles snarl across layers of paint with the urgency of a toddler’s grip.
These bursts of sludge, infantile if beautiful, and Barnes’ overly-casual, whiskey-swilling conviviality belie the fact he holds a degree in fine arts from Evergreen. And you’d never guess that his work from previous decades consist of large-scale, ethereal graphite or charcoal drawings, like the feathery portrait of Sylvia Plath tucked in one corner of tonight’s exhibit. Her face also seems to melt away, but with a different energy, fading to white beneath a the shadow of a lower lip. There is a tenderness in the line work that whispers.
Old pieces and new are hung together in the show. It’s a jarring juxtaposition, given the screaminess of Barnes’ recent work, yet a common devotional empathy is palpable amid the scribbling. One of his recent paintings, part of a series called “Super Models” (they’re portraits of friends) is a fiery-haired rendering of Amelia Bonow wearing a #ShoutYourAbortion t-shirt. Gestures like these sprinkled among the irreverent, finger-painty wildness suggest the female-as-muse isn’t just a target of the lusty gaze or a haggard art historical trope. The figures are uncontainable—in both rendering and objecthood. They are confrontational with sheer thereness. Barnes’ documentation is an homage and a vote for all the defiant, loud-as-fuck women passing through the world.
