‘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

‘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.

Purchase copy of ‘Visual Alchemy’ book

Visual Alchemy’ is a limited edition hardback book with 50 Bohuslav Barlow plates, published in 1987 by Babylon Trust, with text by Jeff Nuttall and introduction by John Robert-Blunn.

Price New: £38 incl post (UK)

Contact: mpgb@mac.com for details