Not Too Tight at All
The disciplined abstracts of Helmut Barnett

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
February 5, 2010

There's an explosion of color inside the big white 100-year-old house one block east of I-35 on Third Street. The house is the studio of Helmut Barnett, artist of large abstract paintings, of smaller abstract drawings. The explosion of color is his many works rendered on stretched canvas and fine thick paper: posed on easels, stacked in corners, hung on walls, piled upon tables, stashed in drawer after drawer of several wooden cabinets.

He's a busy man, this Barnett. He's currently preparing work for his fourth one-man show – appropriately titled "Big Paintings, Little Drawings" – at Wally Workman Gallery, and he has a warehouse worth of brilliance after almost four decades of pursuing his art.

"I've been in Austin a long time," says Barnett, "and I've been very lucky with studios. I had a studio on Congress Avenue for 28 years. That was 908 Congress, the same block that Little City is in now, and I was there from '74 to 2002. And before that I had a place on Sixth Street, upstairs from where the parkside restaurant is now."

Barnett's personal history is captured on the tall refurbished walls of the former residence that he's occupied for eight years now, cherished images marking the passage of time, framed among a spectacular array of paintings and drawings: photos of the band he played guitar with as a young man in Germany, of the plane he flew in as a radar technician for the United States Air Force, of his old studio on Congress, of Barnett and his wife on a date in the restaurant – the Avenue – below that old studio, of the couple's daughter, who's now attending Texas A&M.

History, arranged upon the verticals like the diversity of shapes in Barnett's biggest works. History, but nothing near the current studio's own century mark, right? Even though there has to be a substantial number of years to account for the skills the man has acquired, the finesse with which he brings his polychrome wonders into being.

"I'm going to be 64," says the artist, running a hand back through the thick brush of gray hair atop his head. "I don't feel 64."

Barnett uses whatever's necessary (but mostly acrylic paint) to translate his visions from internal to external, and the results are often stunning. Not in abstracts like abstract expressionism's more emo slashes and splotches that pretty much assault a defenseless surface, but strategically applied, complexly balanced abstracts. Like Mies van der Rohe tweaking the color schemes of lepidoptera. Like Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian collaborating at the peak of a Ritalin binge. Like no one does quite the way Helmut Barnett does.

"I like to draw a lot," says Barnett, gesturing toward a small outcropping of sketchbooks on one table. "I like black-and-white drawings, pencil drawings. The drawing is very spontaneous and quick, and there's a bit of playfulness involved – sometimes I'll start drawing with my left hand, just to get different shapes. And I do put some recognizable things in the abstracts, if they show up. But I don't intend to; I don't know what they're going to look like beforehand. This painting here, for instance, this shape started out as just a black blob, and I made it look more like a bust. It's called Bad Boy Bust." He chuckles. "I like alliteration in some of my titles.

"So, yes, sometimes I do work the shapes out: I see something I like, and I develop it a bit, kind of refine it. And usually the drawings stay the same size; but, lately, what I've been doing for my paintings ... I'll make little sketches – I have books that I fill with drawings – and when I do one that I like, I go out here and put on my overhead projector and project the image onto a canvas. And that way it comes out much larger but with exact proportions. And I'll paint it that way. This," he says, walking over to an unfinished piece on an easel, "is one I'm working on now, for the new show."

So amazing, the subtle gradations of color, that it has to be asked: He doesn't use an airbrush, does he?

"No, I don't," says Barnett. "I tried an airbrush, years ago, but I didn't like it. I found it ... too mechanical. This is just done very carefully – with a lot of taping. I use a lot of masking tape, and I do a lot of layering with a brush and just blend the colors together. I use a large brush, and I work very fast. I have to, because the paint dries so fast. It's acrylics – it's not oils. Large areas are really hard to do."

And yet look at how one color smooths into the next; see the barely discernible strokes of sable or camel hair or whatever pulled the pigment. Never mind, even, the overall visual impact; just, ah, groove on the skill of application. It's so wonderfully ... controlled.

"Well, you could look at it like that," says Barnett, smiling, seeming a shade uncomfortable with the compliments. "You could look at it like that – in a positive way. Or you could look at it in a negative way." He shrugs. "Maybe it's too tight."

As if providing evidence of his efforts in combating such putative tightness, Barnett points to another work on the other side of the room. "That's some of the masking tape I used," he says. "I cut it into pieces and glued it on there, just kind of messed around with it." Look: Short lines of textured color form a staggered spectrum in many rows across a large rectangle. Beautiful. And slightly reminiscent of something Lance Letscher might create.

"Ah," says Barnett, "I know Lance. What I do that's more like what Lance does, I paint on the collages I make. I take books – physics books, chemistry books, mechanical drawing books – because I like the little shapes in there – and I play with the shapes that are in there, cut them up, extend them into drawings, and paint over them. I make the collages at home: That's where I glue them together. My wife doesn't like me using the dining-room table, but that's where I do it. And then I bring them here for painting."

And over here, on a pair of paintings halfway up one of the walls, what technique produced the strangely modulated gray tones in the background?

"That's a solvent transfer," explains Barnett. "What I do, I take pages from magazines and put them in a cookie tray that's filled with lacquer thinner. The lacquer thinner loosens the ink, and if you pick the page up – real quick – and put it on here, then it transfers, and sometimes – see? – you can even pick up a pattern. And I like working in black and white, but most of the things I sell, well, people like color. And so here, on top of the transfers, I did a whole series on what, for lack of a better term, I call ribbons."

And over there is another series, based on other notebook sketches. And over there are variations on red waveforms. And over there are what appear to be giant silhouettes of complex beadwork. And over there is – holy Yves Tanguy, is this amount of work what it takes to make a living as a painter? What about when Barnett was first starting out, after the USAF, after graduating from UT with a bachelor's of fine arts back in '74?

"In the very beginning, I wasn't making a living from my art." he says. "I had to take part-time jobs. But I wasn't married then, and I didn't want to take a full-time job, because I felt – and I felt real strong about this – I didn't want to get comfortable with a regular paycheck and slowly delegate my painting to weekends. And, being single, I was able to go ahead and just take care of myself; I really didn't need a lot of money. So, because of the good graces of my landlord, I was able to work. Plus, I had a friend in the restaurant below; I would work in the original Waterloo [Ice House], get a free lunch and a little extra money. So I got by. And these days ... well, it's still not easy."

Barnett looks around the spacious studio, at the high ceiling that had to be rescued (with a car jack and several 2-by-8s) from sagging, at the formerly graffiti-covered walls now showing white between the dozens and dozens of paintings and drawings and collages and framed photos, at a growing body of work that another artist might sacrifice his left arm to have created. "I mean," he says, a wry smile collaging itself into the contours of his face, "I can come here and make art all day long, but I can't make anybody buy it."

Many people, however, do. And you can, too, of course; or, at least, you can see the newest works – an orchestrated explosion of color and form and techniques – on display at Wally Workman Gallery throughout the month of February at this particular point in history.

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History in the Making
A new exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center proves that no job is too small when it comes to 'Making Movies'

By Kimberley Jones
Austin Chronicle
February 5, 2010

"Dear Bobby. You like my letters? Here's another."

So wrote Elia Kazan to Robert De Niro in a letter on the subject of The Last Tycoon, the pair's first and only project together. No doubt Bobby did like Kazan's letters,and Kazan, too – along with Martin Scorsese, he presented the director with a controversial honorary Oscar in 1999. And one could comfortably claim that those letters had at least one more fan: the archivist. Indeed, if the archivist had a vote, one imagines he'd say, "By all means, keep 'em coming."

Of course, Kazan left this mortal coil some time ago, but De Niro's collection of movie-related materials still swells and has a permanent home at the University of Texas' Harry Ransom Center. Acquired in 2006 and ranging from early head shots to more than 3,000 individual costume items, props, and a full body cast used in the 1994 production of Frankenstein, the De Niro holdings feature prominently in a new exhibit called "Making Movies," which explores the collaborative process that goes into the craft and creation of cinema.

"I didn't want to do just another memorabilia show or just, you know, highlights of the collection. I wanted to try to say something," explained Steve Wilson, the HRC's associate curator of film. "I let the materials speak for themselves. So what the collection is about is the various creative jobs that go into making a movie."

The new collection, which opens to the public Feb. 9 and features more than 350 items culled from the HRC's vast holdings, devotes distinct sections to those various creative jobs: director, screenwriter, producer, production designer, art director, actor, costume designer, hair and makeup artist, cinematographer, special effects designer, editor, and composer. Publicity and exhibition are also highlighted.

Eleven days before opening, I walked through the exhibit with Wilson, sidestepping workmen as they leveled frames on a wall. A hall to be devoted to original costumes like Scarlett O'Hara's burgundy ball gown and Travis Bickle's taxi-driver jacket was still empty –"It's going to be pretty dramatic," Wilson assured me – but the materials already on display were hugely impressive. This is kid-in-a-candy-store stuff for any serious movie buff, where every corner turned begs a fresh exclamation: the giant scissors from Spellbound's Dalí dream sequence! Ernest Lehman's brochure from Mount Rushmore, with stage directions for North by Northwest's precipice-scaling scribbled in blue ink!

"Making Movies" is heavy on Gone With the Wind artifacts; producer David O. Selznick's papers mark the largest collection at the center, and Selznick, a notorious micromanager and memo-writer, required a lot of paper. In the producer portion of the exhibit, a preproduction chart weighs what rival studios MGM and Warner Bros. could bring to the table (respectively, Clark Gable and Errol Flynn, among other variables). Later, in the section devoted to screenwriting, a list details the pros and cons of writers considered for the Gone With the Wind gig, including Maxwell Anderson, William Faulkner ("not very reliable in his plans or habits"), Philip Barry, and Sinclair Lewis ("might be a little too political minded or a little too gin-minded"). The GWTW color scheme devised by William Cameron Menzies – for whom the term production designer was first invented – is examined in a wall of painterly storyboards. And around another corner, there's a take-your-breath-away close-up of Vivien Leigh with a clapboard labeled "tear stains"; rightly worried about continuity, the filmmakers wanted to make sure they could re-create precisely the mixed streak of dirt and tear.

That image is a particular favorite of Wilson's, who told me he plans to mount the reproduction on his office wall when the exhibit goes down in August. A 20-year veteran of the HRC who previously worked at the Paramount Theatre and the long-shuttered Varsity Theatre on the Drag, Wilson labored a full year on the "Making Movies" exhibit. He pointed to a nearby display about the 1966 film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the assemblage of which, Wilson wagered, took several weeks alone –"and we had three times as much stuff." He looked around ruefully. "I kind of have curator's remorse throughout the show of all the things that didn't make the cut."

What did make the cut: a rare early draft of the Annie Hall script. Graham Greene's original hand-typed story of The Third Man, De Niro's The Deer Hunter dialect cheat sheet for "Western Pennsylvania Language Peculiarities."

"He told me a great story," Wilson said when we reached a trove of De Niro materials. "It was sometime around [The Deer Hunter]. He was at Western Costume looking for a costume for a movie. And it's real common even today for them to recycle costumes. So he's going through these racks of clothes, and he comes across a costume for Bonnie and Clyde. And he said, 'This is wrong that they're recycling this – this is an important [artifact]!' And at that point, he started keeping everything."

The keeping of everything is a curator's dream, of course – especially when the subject exactingly labels every bric-a-brac, as was the case with screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who started sending his materials to the HRC in the early Sixties. "He wrote notes on everything," said Wilson. "In some cases, it's just kind of better to let him explain things."

But there's thrill in discovery, too, in solving the puzzle of a piece that comes in without any identifiers. Wilson showed me a wall devoted to the archival papers of Alfred Junge, the German-born production designer who worked closely with the Archers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's film collective. Wilson pointed to a page of doodlings and near-indecipherable note-taking.

"This is all Junge's handwriting. It's written on top of a letter that his son wrote to him. In corresponding with Junge's daughter-in-law, we think that this is some sort of conversation or he was brainstorming with somebody.

"On the other side there's a lot more ballet [drawings]. We think that he was having a talk maybe with [director] Michael Powell, maybe with [costume designer] Hein Heckroth. And we think they were talking about both The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus at the same time.

"But he makes these notes about Black Narcissus: 'Always just off-white.' The nuns' habits were off-white and that was kind of the famous thing he did on Black Narcissus. It brought the color palette down and it made everything look realistic because of that white not being white but being a little farther down the palette."

For Wilson, the mystery behind that slip of paper wasn't an idle curiosity; rather, it represented something integral about the filmmaking process.

"I'm always trying to show how each one of these artists involved in a film is trying to make a contribution to the characters and the story. A costume designer is not just putting clothes on but is really trying to say something through the clothes."

That fact –that movies are built on attention to the tiniest of details –is the raison d'etre of the exhibit. But if filmmakers are doing their jobs right, then most moviegoers won't even notice. "The vast majority of our collection is about mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, and that style is marked by invisibility, by not calling attention to itself and by putting the story and the characters first."

"Making Movies," then, makes that invisible work overt and, in the process, pays remarkable tribute to it.

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