John Bartley

6 This is a personal response to John Bartley’s paintings and to a body of work that I know hasn’t come easily to him. As it turns out, this short piece of writing hasn’t come easily to me. The paintings, whose creation at times was a challenge for John, became for me an almost overwhelming pleasure that indeed overwhelmed me. There are so many things I want to say. Apart from thinking that these paintings are utterly beautiful I am struck by how strongly they bring to mind ideas around darkness. Why do these paintings feel uplifting when they are at times so dark? Is it the light that seems to glow from behind the dark paint? And what is that light in darkness doing to the surrounding colours that takes us to the old masters? Because some passages in these works could be abstracted thoughts in paint that flashed through the mind of Tiepolo, or El Greco, just before sleep. Dreamy, indefinite edges of colour; like clouds, these might shift the next time we turn to look at the canvas. If what John is painting seems like landscapes, then they are decidedly internal lands in which tiny vignettes reveal themselves like little moments of truth, making even the smallest paintings in the show feel strangely monumental. But it is the tenor of each painting as a whole that reveals to us what I know to be true, that John’s response centre is his heart, not his head. It is almost palpable: he reacts to the physicality of mark and colour through his feelings, rather than through his thoughts. We are looking across and through a memory, or a series of deeply felt impressions. The paintings in this exhibition were Dark beautiful