Bo Bartlett

Just finished this little painting entitled ‘The Day They Breached the Dam’. I created a tableaux using Titian’s ‘Rape of Europa’. Betsy and Lark posed together on my favorite old sofa. Betsy has recently reupholstered it in a lovely jade green velvet. In 1594 an unknown artist from the School of Fountainbleu painted two sisters involved in a humorous display of affection. Theodore Chasseriau painted his two sisters Adele and Genevieve in 1843. The Titian is one of my favorite paintings in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The realistic portrait by Chasseriau is one of his best paintings. It is probably the emotional attachment he had to his sisters. Later, more romantic Chasseriau paintings tend to not hold up as well. The Fountainbleu painting, ‘Gabrielle d’Estrees and one of her Sisters’ is a curiosity, and always good for a chuckle. What is going on there? A question which keeps us coming back regardless of the paintings primitive awkwardness. ‘The Day They Breached the Dam’ was painted during the days when the Army Corp of Engineers was in the process of blowing up the dam on the Chattahoochee River in my hometown, Columbus Georgia. The painting is about friendship, strength, certainty, openness, and letting go.