‘Visual Alchemy.’ Text by Jeff Nuttall
Isolation is first a condition and then an exercise. Barlow is isolated by family orientation, by natural orientation and by his complete disinterest in the obligatory abstraction being doled out like cheap religion at the Central School when he was a student. Czech-German with a black stepfather, living in England. A person to whom alienation has become vital.
Isolation as an exercise seeks out a valley town in the border of Lancashire deserted industry, an eerie romantic wasteland where the structures and artefacts of the industrial revolution litter the landscape like ruins along the Appalation Way.
Tow-paths tunnel beneath packhorse bridges that climb at crazy angles.
A patina of soot and grime emphasises the improvised stonework of walls that lean and warp and spill. Shaping of usage by busy people long gone determines every surface, making all things legible like hieroglyphs, a place where the dead have left silent anecdotes everywhere.
Isolation as exercise makes Barlow a magpie who scratches up his techniques in quiet neglected corners where the innovations of a hundred revolutionary years have scarcely registered. His feet echo on the cold stone stairs of the 19th Century’s regional art galleries which remain as monuments to industrial wealth and power that now seem quaint; the obscure purchase made when the cultured council representative was dispatched to the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy to make his judicious choice; when the local council celebrated itself by collecting all work locally done, depicting local scenes.
Barlow walks among the huge encrusted frames and he notices how well these historic non-runners recorded detail, depicted light; how well they did it, and how practically they did it. The London tutors had been prepared to tell him how to juxtapose flat colour masses, how to question the notion of painting, how to imitate the fashionable Americans.
Having refused their teaching Barlow set about collecting his own vocabulary.
Constable and his successors could indicate how a knife loaded with white whipped across the rough tooth of the painted canvas could make a landscape sparkle as though the rain had just blown past. Pre-Raphaelites and their followers could show how only paint could load photographic detail with poetic significance. Obscure German and Italian mannerists, filtered through the eccentric acquisitiveness of anachronistic gentry into little-known provincial collections, could show how landscape may become the vehicle of the erotic and the philosophic.
Barlow goes to work, he paints his Pennine retreat relentlessly. Every stone, every ginnel, every rocky field. He drenches himself with the light that passes in and out of the hills’ hunchbacks like shoals of silver fish until he can render it not as direct depiction of something seen but as the very visible substance of sensibility.
He seldom sends in his paintings anywhere. Not even to the John Moores. He does not pussyfoot around Bond Street with a pocketful of slides. He heeds the comment of absolutely no-one whether they be for or against.
He has been in the valley for perhaps seven years when his skills are learned, perfected and ready to compose a visual idyll about how a man simultaneously condemned and addicted to isolation may make his way in human relationships. Three dolls are constructed of mixed materials, a boy, a woman and a powerfully malevolent man. Barlow conducts them onto the stage.
The deathscape. The doll is a mountebank, a busker, a pedlar. In landscapes where the viaducts of disused railways span the arid plains between Tuscan hills, where Oriental gardens dream away their dotage amongst the Gothic litter of demolished Victorian churches, he sits bemused by his bric-a-brac.
He is a dreamer with Charlie Chaplin feet and a comedian’s battered topper.
He has forgotten what song he was to play on his strange home-made banjo but this is scarcely of consequence because his air of shabby ineptitude sheaths him in a formidable cocoon of innocence. Only from within is the innocence subverted as the bric-a-brac spells out a decapitation. Stranded fish lie predatory at the lip of the moist pit from which a head had been unsocketed. The knifeman is himself piscine, shark-like as he broods over his butcher’s cleaver, under his yokel’s hat, his feet still too vast for grace. His dreamgirl wears her hair long as Alice on either side of her void face. Under her coster-girl hat she moons over her silent pipe surrounded by the poet’s touchstones.
Then the dreamgirl’s features are filled in.
A real woman with a face as sharp as a bayleaf and a body as fine as a sparrow’s has walked into the mountains of the death-trance. She reveals them to be no more than the semi-derelict valley where Barlow lives. Amidst the fishswarms of light she sits. On the yard flags, near the churns, the decapitator shows her his wares. She consoles him stoically at the bottom of the hillside awash with evening where Barlow’s house tumbled into the swollen river that had eroded its culvert. And now the predator has changed his garb. It is he now who wears the coster-girl’s rakish hat and his motheaten dress jacket is replaced by a clown’s satins. The fish-headed butcher of the plains has had his innocence restored. Almost immediately, brandishing a punchdoll that parodies his capers, he learns to fly.
Jeff Nuttall 1985.
