‘Visual Alchemy’. Introduction by John Robert-Blunn
There is something very peculiar about Bohuslav Barlow, and not just his name, which merely reflects the fact that he was born in Czechoslovakia. His works are peculiar, too, as this collection should prove to anyone new to them and they are definitely not to everyone’s taste, thank heavens, for an artist who tries to please everyone may achieve commercial success but is eventually doomed to artistic failure.
Barlow is deservedly achieving commercial success, in that his work is in may private and public collections, including those in Leeds, Calderdale, London and Manchester, and the Saudi Arabian royal family. Not a bad record for an artist who has been professional for a mere 15 years after gaining the equivalent of an honours degree at the Central School of Art in London.
My mention of the Saudi Arabian royal family is not for the sake of dropping a distinguished name or two but to show that, although much of his work reflects his ideas of the Pennines in a way the Pennines have probably never been represented in art before, the quality of his work strikes many. What separates the two counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, the Pennines, also unites them in a common bleakness, an uncommon grandeur and the scars of the Industrial Revolution. Barlow explores and exploits these qualities in a distinctive way at his Lancashire home of Todmorden, where he has lived and worked for the past 13 years and where he is known by his many friends as Slavo.
How he arrived in Todmorden is a long story, but, briefly, it was by way of wanderings in Europe, North Africa, Turkey and India, not to mention Blackpool where he and his mother settled in 1955 after a time in Bavaria. By all accounts, young Bohuslav took some time to adjust to life in Blackpool, especially so soon after the second world war, when anyone who came from Germany was suspect. (The fact that he was born in Czechoslovakia, which had suffered German occupation and was then liberated to become part of the Soviet empire, would, I guess, have had little influence on English attitudes of those times).
Add to all this that, as John Avison has said, “it was a comfortless, poverty-stricken childhood” and that over young Bohuslav “hung the shadow of a violent stepfather and the drizzle of desperate circumstances”, and you have an idea of what motivated young Slavo to become an artist. He studied in Manchester and London and, by degree and travel, in living Todmorden where, perhaps for the first time, he felt himself at home. For all outsiders might know, his accent is pure Todmorden. Todmorden he not only likes, but loves. It’s home.
Barlow is good, exceptionally good, at life-figure studies, as will be readily apparent to newcomers to his work. His nude studies have a quiet eroticism about them. I find it interesting that what might otherwise be classed as landscapes often feature nudes in a bleak landscape which daringly include such apparently irrelevant Todmorden-area items as the railway viaduct, stone-built cottages (often falling down at crazy angles) and pigeons (or are they doves?) of peace.
For those who like bleak Northern landscapes which merge into the wallpaper, Barlow simply will not do. For them he is outrageous. In recent years, he has experimented successfully with assaults on conventional views of composition (although his commissioned portraits are and will remain excellent examples of his technique, his professionalism and his ability, working fast – as he always does – to stunning effect).
The angles of his work are, as I have already said, often alarming, as if he is trying to be different, which he is. Barlow is indeed different. Work out the symbolism for yourself; he uses certain ‘props’, including a clown, for effects which are melodramatic, sombre, humorous and fantastical. Add to this Barlow’s remarkably vivid backgrounds, which conform superbly to all the rules, and it suggests that his recent work featuring diagonalism is a further development in his brilliant emergence as a provocative artist.
He uses life-size puppets as models, models “who never moved or became bored”. Barlow says: “The world they inhabit is, in general, the stony architecture of the Pennines where I live. Most of the works are executed in a mixed media technique which keeps pace with the many images which present themselves to me day and night”.
As for the symbolism, Barlow has so far left that for the beholder to determine, for which many thanks. As a no-nonsense artist, Barlow lets the pictures speak for themselves.
I commend them without his knowledge. When he asked me to write this introduction, he said, “Write what you like”. I have done so and Bohuslav Barlow and I may never speak to each other again, if I have not written what he expected. By the time I had written this, he was on a professional visit to the United States. He left a message asking me to send my copy to his publishers. That surely must be the mark of an artist not only of integrity but one of great self-confidence. These are among the many of Barlow’s qualities. There are many more.
John Robert-Blunn 1985