Mary Sinclair and Peter & Richard Barnet Exhibition
Sideshow Gallery
This event has ended.
Mary Sinclair and the now well-known artist Will Barnet, arrived separately from New England to study art at the Art Students League in the early 1930s, fell in love, married, and had three sons. The present show at the SideShow Gallery is about the work of painter Mary Sinclair and her sons, artists Peter Barnet, and Richard Barnet.
During the 1940s and early 1950s the Barnets lived in a small apartment on the upper west Side of Manhatten. Will Barnet taught at the Art Students League and was deeply involved in the New York Art world. Will Barnet was a very social person. As a little boy Peter remembers many of his Dad’s friends, among them, artists Bob Blackburn, Romare Beardon, “the two Louises” - Louise Nevelson and Louise Bourgeois- and Stuart Davis. Over the coming years Mary, Peter, and Richard came into contact with many of the great 20th Century artists from the ash-can school artists such as Isabel Bishop, through the abstract expressionist, color field painters, and the pop artists, many of whom studied with Will and became his friends.
Summers were often spent in Danbury Connecticut where we had a small house and Will converted the chicken coop into a studio to paint in. In the 1950s and 1960s the family spent summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which had its own thriving art scene. Provincetown at that time was the center of the growing abstract-expressionist movement. Peter Barnet remembers this period at the Hans Hoffman School of painting, the air filled with wine, jazz, and the beginnings of the great social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s.
Many of Mary Sinclair’s early landscapes are from the fields around Danbury Connecticut or the sea and sand around Provincetown and Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Mary went on to bring up six children in total, and at the same time, paint a significant number of vibrant paintings. Mary’s paintings are vigorous, painterly visions of her family members and the world around her.
Peter Barnet and Richard Barnet, as artists, had the good fortune to live within the center of a very dynamic period in American Art, and growing up surrounded by working artists. Both of their parents often worked on their compositions from home in a central living space, integrated into family life. For the children of Will and Mary, art, the visits to museums and openings, relationships with other artists, discussion of art and the creative process, all was a daily presence throughout childhood, as natural as breathing.
Peter Barnet attributes much of his own aesthetics to diverse sources such as his parents reading him fairy tales as a little boy and his father’s books of classic Japanese prints.
Richard Barnet has played the central role in preserving and promoting his mother’s work. Mary Sinclair was a bohemian spirit who loved being a wife and mother, but also loved to paint. Thanks to Richard Barnet’s persistence we can view her paintings today.
marySinclairartist.com
http://peterbarnet.com/home.html
http://richardbarnetartist.com/
Media
Schedule
from September 12, 2015 to October 17, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-09-12 from 18:00 to 21:00