Listing in The Dictionary of Artists

Painter, born in Czechoslovakia, who moved to England aged eight.

He eventually settled in Todmorden, Yorkshire.

Gained honours degree from Central School of Art.

Barlow’s pictures featured situations such as playing, dreaming or floating, the characters in them being clowns or puppets based on real life-size figures which he created. The world they inhabit is generally the stony architecture of the Pennines.

He began showing with South-East London Art Group and RE in 1970 and went on to appear in numerous group exhibitions, including Hartnoll and Eyre, 1976; MAFA from 1982; Chalk Farm Gallery, 1984; and the House of Commons, in a show of Calderdale Artists, 1987. Showed solo at Ginnel gallery, Manchester, and Grundy Art Gallery and Museum and Leeds City Council hold his work.

The Guardian:

“Barlow’s work is hardly consoling but it has a sense of strange and personal integrity”

“He can extract painful intensity from a subject as uncompromising as an old toy discarded in an empty grate”

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The Yorkshire Post

“His paintings seem to represent the reaction of a sensitive artist to a tough environment”

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Manchester Evening News:

“One of the most original artisits working in the North West”

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Artline Magazine:

“I found the paintings quite superb”

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Hampstead and Highgate Express:

“His work is charged with this sense of theatrical melodrama, as though his characters have crawled from the props basket and, a travesty of reality, are draped in a Transyvanian dreamscape”

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Halifax Courier

“His paintings are frozen moments in an intoxicating dream”

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Yorshire Post

“A highly original and fascinating artist”

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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.

Bohuslav Barlow at The Northern Art Show

The Northern Art Show

13th – 15th November 2009

Harrogate International Centre, Kings Road, Harrogate HG1 5LA

Over fifty original Bohuslav Barlow paintings will be on show and available for purchase at the biggest art show in northern England.

We are delighted to announce that we shall be taking a selection of works by Bohuslav Barlow to the Northern Art Show in Harrogate this autumn. The opening champagne gala preview is on the evening of Thursday 12th November 2009, at the Harrogate International Centre, and represents the first public display of many of the works. It is only appropriate that their debut will be in the North, close to the landscapes and backdrops that Bohuslav made his home in post war Britain. The entire stand shall de dedicated to his work, many of which were painted in the 70’s and 80’s and have remained, unvaunted, in lofts and basements ever since.

There will be an inspiring cross-section of his genres: dark and brooding allegorical landscape scenes, Northern cityscapes, deeply moving figurative work, and the occasional still life. There will be oils, watercolours, and acrylics, as well as inks and mixed media works, and thus a wide range of price points. There will also be a small selection of the works from the hugely successful ‘Garden of Wasted Things’ show from 2008.

To further commemorate this ‘Homecoming’, we have interviewed the reclusive Bohuslav in his studio. For over two hours this extraordinarily intelligent and erudite man, with his fascinating life story, openly, engagingly and at times touchingly reflects on subjects that he went on to represent in his work: war-torn childhood, upheaval, alienation, the London Years and his torrid relationships with both his Mother and Stepfather. This interview is currently being condensed into a series of podcasts which we shall be releasing onto this website, and which we shall be making available, at no cost, to newsletter subscribers. A CD copy of the condensed interview will also be available from our stand at the Northern Art Show. For an advance copy of the interview CD please contact mpgb@mac.com

For further information about the Northern Art Show go to www.northernartshow.com

For an invitation to the show (13th – 15th November) or the preview evening (12th November) please contact us at mpgb@mac.com

‘The Garden of Wasted Things’ – Exhibition of paintings by Bohuslav Barlow

Thursday October 30th 2008 – Tuesday 4th November 2008.

The Peter Pears Gallery, 152 High Street, Aldeburgh.

For a preview of some of the new works on offer see the images within ‘The Gallery’ tab section of this page. Altenatively click this link to see the original summer exhibition catalogue: The Garden of Wasted Things – Exhibition Catalogue

Following on from the huge success and critical acclaim of the opening show in the  summer, ‘The Garden of Wasted Things’ exhibition moves to Aldeburgh this autumn with the release of many previously unexhibited paintings with an emphasis on this still life, landscape and nude works of this most extraordinary of artists. The collection illustrates the enormous range of his talent and breadth of his abilities with all media, with a number of oils, pastels and mixed media on offer. All are welcome to attend, and there will be a special drinks evening on Saturday 1st November. For an invitation please contact Graham Blakesley on the e mail address below.

Bohuslav Barlow’s works have their roots, to a large extent, in a history of post war  displacement and childhood alienation that made isolation a condition of his life and which has fed into his unique art. As Jeff Nuttall wrote: ‘Isolation is first a condition and then an exercise. Barlow was isolated by family 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.’


Born as Bohuslav Klos in a small town in Upper Moravia, Czechoslovakia, in 1947, he never knew his father. After fleeing to Germany with his mother who soon moved to England, he lived with his grandparents for eight years before joining her and an American Guyanan stepfather, from whom he took the name Barlow, to live in abject poverty in Northern England.

It was here that, with crayons and pencils as his only toys, the profoundly unhappy Bohuslav discovered his metier as an artist, giving him release from a comfortless childhood with ‘the drizzle of desperate circumstances’. After school Bohuslav followed a year at Manchester School of Art before going on to the Central School of Art in London, where as a figurative painter he was somewhat out of step with the prevailing expressionist and Pop Art trends and isolation again became a feature of his existence.

After graduating and various solitary travels abroad, a chance visit on his motorbike to Blackburn took him through Todmorden. The bleak and wild scenery of the Pennines immediately appealed to him and perhaps for the first time in his life he felt at home. He has lived and worked in Todmorden for the past 35 years. He is known locally as ‘Slavo’.

The dark and somewhat brooding vistas of railway viaducts, packhorse bridges and structures form the back drop to much of his work, but the alarming angles of his compositions and the cast of characters and ‘props’ that are used to fantastical effect are very different. A medley of strange beings inhabits these paintings in surreal, melodramatic scenes where one feels there is a sort of personal mythology being played out.

If the symbolism in many of Bohuslav’s paintings is meant to give us clues, then we are left to work it out for ourselves. His early life, perhaps, where isolation meant he had to construct his own alternative world may help us, but the artist himself says he does not know. Ultimately these enigmatic, strangely beautiful paintings must speak for themselves.

For further details and more images please contact:

Graham Blakesley

mpgb@mac.com

Request Invitation to Exhibition Opening Evening

If you would like an invitation to the preview evening for the Bohuslav Barlow Exhibition on Friday 4th July 6.30 – 8.00 p.m at the Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden, please contact Graham Blakesley at mpgb@mac.com

“The Garden of Wasted Things” Exhibition Catalogue

I’ll Give You The World

“i’ll give you the world” is a superb example of Bohuslav Barlow’s work.

This painting will be amongst 50 on display and for sale at a one man show to be held at The Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire from the Saturday 5th July – 20th July 2008.

This is a rare opportunity to see so many of the artist’s paintings brought together in one place.