New Works

Ira Barkoff is painting like a big, fearless guy — bold gouts of pigment spattering the sky, and hills alight with color.    

   His work is lush. Stunning. Headlong.   

   And while it is inspired by nature, his paintings are mostly imagined, he tells me. They come from some unpredictable place that feeds his gorgeous and impressionist landscapes.

   Unlike numbers of other artists, his father — a furrier-cum-taxi driver-cum salesman — and his mother, a homemaker and bookkeeper, liked his drawings, and they liked the idea of his being an artist. But just to be sure, they sent his rendering of a sillhouette copied from a matchbook cover to an art school that asked potential students to “Draw me.â€

   If you could, you had talent.

   “Yes, your son has talent,†a letter from the art school stated.    

   Barkoff grew up (exactly when I can’t say, because he does not tell his age, but I would guess the ’40s) in the four-square, red-brick world of Manhattan’s Peter Cooper Village. He and his friends played baseball and took Saturday morning art lessons at the Brooklyn Museum and Barkoff would get called out of class to paint Thanksgiving decorations at school.

   He kept painting.

   “When I first started at the Art Students League, I worked with figures to learn how to paint. But after I discovered landscapes, I never wanted to paint people again.â€

   And he does not. His studio images are full of fields, and of rivers heading for openings in a hilly and forested terrain, and of giant skies and fat, marmoreal clouds flecked with pale umber and violet. But no people.

   This studio is in the remote house he built for his wife and himself at the end of a mountain road in Cornwall, a house that no one could stumble upon by accident. The ascent is forbidding, but the top, the house he designed and the world falling away from it, is a pleasure to reach. This is where Barkoff feels his way into his work.

   “Paint, paint, paint, paint, paint,†he tells his students at the Washington Art Association. “I don’t worry about the outcome. I just let my subconscious run.

   “I feel it out as opposed to thinking it out,†he says, casually running a brushful of blue across a piece on the easle. “Of course I do paint over a lot of canvases. Not everything works out.â€

   But he has learned patience for when this free-fall into art fails him. “Sometimes I think I can’t paint. I’ve lost it. I just have to wait for it to come back.â€

   And sometimes, when it comes back it changes. Rob Ober, who owns the gallery in Kent where Barkoff is exhibiting this month, pulled out some of the artist’s older pieces to compare with his new work on the gallery walls.

   These older pieces are lovely. And formal, bridled by their own beauty. Looking at the new pieces it’s as though something gigantic in this small, frail fellow has been loosed.

   It’s a marvelous thing to see.

   Ira Barkoff’s “New Works†is on view at Ober Gallery on Old Barn Road in Kent, CT, through June 25. For information, call 860-927-5030 or go to www.obergallery.com.       

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