Bohuslav Barlow

‘It Must Be So Relaxing’.  An article in Lancashire Magazine by Bill Pringle. July 1990

Life is strange. Living quietly in Todmorden, at the bottom of a craggy Pennine hillside on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border, is an accomplished painter. He is a man who, but for the odd twists and turns that may have been  feature of his life, may have been anything else – a London postman or even a president of Czechoslovakia!

His name is Bohuslav Barlow. He is known to the world at large as ‘Slavo’ but his name provides a few clues to his unusual origins and the extraordinary sequence of events that brought him to Todmorden.

Barlow works from his studio in Todmorden and has had numerous exhibitions, local, regional and national, including the Royal Academy in London. His work is featured in a book ‘Visual Alchemy’, published by the Babylon Trust in Todmorden. He is established.

His paintings are distinctive. He does paint ‘conventional’ landscapes and portraits, applying to both a technique which has all the hallmarks of excellence, reflecting the classical training which helped to mould his natural talent. But the characteristic Barlow paintings are very different.

At first glance many of them appear chaotic, a weird collection of characters and dislocated objects: human figures with animal heads, rag dolls, birds and dogs, often portrayed in an unnatural whirl of movement. Landscapes and buildings may be depicted tilted at impossible and disturbing angles, proportions grotesquely exaggerated. There is a compelling power, a heavy hint of intensity and passion about these pictures.

Bohuslav Barlow’s paintings are certainly different. His life story is also considerably different from anything that most of us have ever experienced, and may well account to a large degree for the unusual way in which his talent has developed.

He was born in the Czechoslovakian province of Moravia in 1947. His mother and her parents were Sudeten Germans and fled to Germany soon after Barlow was born, to escape Communist persecution. His father, a Czech, forbidden any contact with Germans, stayed behind. Barlow’s parents never married.

Work was hard to find in Bavaria in those days, so his mother came to England, first as a contract worker in the cotton mills of Lancashire, then training and working as a nurse. Barlow stayed in Germany with his grandparents who looked after him until he was eight.

His mother made frequent visits to see him in Germany and it was on the train from Preston to London, at the start of one of these visits that she met Neville, a black Guyanese serviceman. After a whirlwind romance she married him and brought young Bohuslav to live with them in England. It is from his stepfather that Bohuslav takes his surname.

Barlow’s first years in his adopted country were hard, unhappy years. The emotions, bred of isolation in a strange land, which drew his mother and step-father together, were further heightened for him. He spoke no English. He found it impossible to communicate with his step-father who was – and still is, to this day – a stranger to him; the family was desperately poor, both parents were out of work much of the time.

For the first two years Barlow didn’t even go to school. He stayed at home, a lonely figure gazing wistfully at the world beyond his bedroom window, wondering what it was like outside. One thing he could see was Blackpool Tower, a structure which fascinated him. He occupied much of his time sketching it – he didn’t know then that these were his first steps towards a successful career as an artist.

When he did start school it was particularly difficult for him. His English was poor (today it  is flawless Northern English with no trace of a foreign accent). He was bullied mercilessly because of his German background and German mannerisms. But he was tough and the experience only made him tougher, more determined to carve out for himself a place in the world, safe from the traumas of his abysmal life at home. These early years made a profound impression on him, colouring many of his attitudes even today.

Barlow was bright. He impressed at school, he passed his Eleven Plus and progressed rapidly. For a while he nursed a romantic ambition to join the civil service and work to liberate Czechoslovakia. Who knows, their post-revolutionary president may as well have been a painter as a poet – as is Vaclav Havel, their President since the end of 1989.

Instead, he developed his artistic talents; drawing and painting were what he enjoyed. He gained entry to a pre-Diploma course at Manchester School of Art and from there moved to London and the Central School of Art.

Even while studying he was able to sell his work but he needed more time for his painting than most jobs allow. Still the somewhat naive foreigner, he had no idea that he could ‘sign on’ and let the state pay his rent while he painted. Instead he took a job as a postman – early starts and finish at midday left him plenty of time. But he was allergic to the thick flannel of the uniform and had to give the job up!

Postman or painter, Barlow wasn’t happy in London. He felt distinctly ill at ease there. He wasn’t able to paint the things he wanted to paint, the perspective was limited, confined, oppressive. Realising that there was no need for him to stay in London he moved – to Todmorden.

Why Todmorden? He wanted a dramatic and romantic landscape to operate in and Todmorden was precisely the kind of environment he was looking for. He got to know the area when he was studying at Manchester. Something about it struck a chord and he felt drawn to the gaunt industrial landscapes, and to the stark, rugged beauty of the surrounding hills.

Only after moving to Todmorden did he discover that his birthplace in Northern Moravia has a very similar character – highly industrialised towns surrounded by wild and bleak moorlands. Certainly something inside him guided him subconsciously to his ‘home from home’. Now, with his wife Karin and their two children, he feels more settled, more relaxed and nearer to contentment than he has ever been.

‘It Must Be So Relaxing’ is the title of one of his paintings, inspired by the yawning gulf between the reality of putting feelings onto canvas and the mistaken idea many people have of the life of a painter. It is a painting which is in many respects typical of the mainstream of his work and the title, which is also typical of Barlow’s wry humour, recalls the kind of remark he often hears. It’s something which he finds at once amusing and irritating.

The comment ignores first of all the fact that painting is, for Barlow, a full-time job, not a leisure occupation to be picked up and put down just when the mood suits. It also demonstrates a degree of ignorance. It appears to ignore the effort that is necessary to translate into a visual image something intense and personal inside the artist, to ignore the depth of feeling the painter experiences as his new creation begins to take shape.

Barlow is an easy man to talk to. There is a frank honesty about him and a natural warmth that would put anyone at ease. I’m sure he is responsive to criticism but he accepts it with the philosophy of someone who believes in letting others feel what they want to feel, do what they want to do and say what they want to say.

“Write anything you want,” he said when I offered to let him look at the draft of this article. It’s not that he doesn’t care what people say or think about him. It’s just that for him, everyone is entitled to their point of view.

This is an attitude which is emphasised when it comes to talking to Barlow about his paintings. Many of them are, for the uninitiated, puzzling at first. While we were talking, a visitor called by, and peered with obvious curiosity at a painting on the wall.

“Midsummer Night’s Dream?” he asked. He was presumably confused by the human figure with the deer’s head which he had taken to be an ass’s head!
“No…” said Barlow with a polite smile. Nothing else, no attempt to elaborate. He’d been through all this so many times before. “No.”

It seems to some people who try to ‘understand’ Barlow’s paintings that the artist is telling us something, that the pictures are in some way allegorical. With very few exceptions this is not the case.

“Most people, when confronted with my paintings, want to know the answer to the puzzle they see. I accept that my pictures are puzzling, but I refute the need for an answer. Whenever I have tried, over the many years I have been asked, to explain why my paintings are on a slope or why they include the characters they do, I have felt depressed and mildly angry when the ‘explanations’ have made no difference to the innate laziness of the questioner. Now I refuse to answer THAT question. The pictures must speak for themselves. People want immediate, slick answers so they can close their eyes, albeit their inner eyes, as soon as possible.”

If these words sound harsh, they are not intended to be. They merely echo years of frustration, of trying to explain what cannot be explained. Put another way, in the words of an unattributed quotation, among a number of pithy aphorisms between the pictures on the walls of the gallery: “Is it necessary to cut open the throat of the song bird to find out what makes it sing?”

Barlow would, I’m sure, endorse Leo Tolstoy’s definition: ‘Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.’

For me , at least, some of the pictures are disturbing. There is something profoundly unsettling about them. If they are ‘a transmission of feeling’ Barlow has experienced, then he has clearly experienced some traumatic and tragic feelings.

Particularly in some of his earlier paintings from the 1970’s, the sombre landscapes are bleak, desolate and haunted, suffused with unnatural light. The atmosphere is distinctly nightmarish, with an undercurrent of violence. The pictures are peopled by inhuman figures – a scare-crow character wielding a butcher’s knife, a decapitated corpse, even more vivid for the fact that it is clearly a tailor’s dummy.

Later paintings are – relatively at least – calmer in atmosphere. The landscapes are closer to what we might term ‘attractive’, some are distinctly pastoral. Barlow’s turbulent world seems to have settled down to some extent.

And now there is a frequent visitor to many of the canvases – a slender and beautiful young woman, serene and gentle, standing calmly at the centre of activity, bringing a measure of composure and normality to the rather disorganised world which surrounds her. This is Karin. Barlow tells me with some enthusiasm how highly he regards women, and none more than Karin.

If it’s clear that Barlow’s affection for the female of the species stems from his love of and admiration for his mother, it is tempting to conclude that the character of his works owes a lot to the anguish and torment, disruption and upheavals of his early years. Such a conclusion would, no matter that there may be more than an element of truth in it, be too neat, almost trite, for Barlow.

His paintings are simply his own unique expression of a singular view of life – of places, of people, of events and experiences that have made an impression on him. When I referred to them as representing something like chaos, he corrected me.

“Reality,” he said. “Reality – rearranged.” His own view of reality, arranged as it strikes him.