Rick Bartow

Interview with Rick Bartow

"I just move it around until it looks good."

"Drawing is like a really strange way of writing."

"LA: You've said that "'I see myself as being in a chain that stretches way back to paintings on the rocks. To a certain degree I'm using different materials, but the statement is the same." 

RB: It really was a pointed issue when I received my first major public commission with Saks Fifth Avenue. To me it's really funny. My friend John Stallings, who was my assistant, and I were in Saks Fifth Avenue at night in a big hole, like a giant cave, and we're up on scaffolding. I'm working on the wall in the middle of the night and we've got these lights shining on us, and we're laughing about it because you see those pictures of the guys in the cave and they're painting hunting rituals, they're painting animals. Here I am sitting in the dark with just a few lamps in a big hole. I'm in a strange place in the city trying to paint a picture. And the ultimate end is that I'll be given money so I can buy food, pay my bills and do other things. I see that as an analogy for why the old boys were doing painting, so that they might kill a buffalo or a deer and take it home to support their house and community. Maybe it's grandiose. But to me it was clear that that's what was going on. The elder says culture that's in the museum is dead. Living culture has a television set blasting and a hot rod in the front yard and you've got to worry about your teenage kid, but you're still living a life that's old because you have a reverence for certain things and a certain way of life and you hold certain things to be true. So culture has to move on or it's just a museum piece. It's dead; it's something that people look at but don't understand. Up there on that ceiling is a line that's moving on and part of it is moving through me. No more than anybody else. I'm not tooting my horn. I'm just saying that I think for modern day artists it's the same thing."

"A friend of mine tells me to just do the work, don't bother with explanations, don't bother quizzing yourself. Somebody someday will explain it all."