The Troubled Search for Arts Fusion: Mitchel Barrett
An interview with a complex and true visionary artist, about the relationship between fashion and arts worlds, visionary taste and the troubled search of a meeting point for various arts.
Mitchel J. Barrett was born in England in 1960. In 1980 Barrett was accepted at Stafford College of Art and Design to study a Foundation Course in Art. Disappointed by the emphasis on experimental abstract art and a lack of tutoring in classical art craftsmanship, he decided to quit the course early and moved to Manchester. He was for several years a best known fashion model, this experience contributed to his vast cultural experience but enabled him to continue to paint and exhibit his work. He had his first solo exhibition in Kyoto, Japan in 1992. In 1997, Barrett exhibited with two acclaimed Thai artists in Bangkok. In April 1997, Barrett made a short film called ‘The Mask’ which is currently being shown on this website, Surrealism Now TV and YouTube. Having written the screenplay, storyboarded the images, designed the masks, then created the paintings relevant to the story, producing, directing and acting in the film, it displayed his versatility as an artist. Back in England, Barrett was accepted at film school at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in September 1997, where he specialised in directing and screenwriting, along with Art Direction and the study of film. He known Ernst Fuchs in 2001 and in the 2002 he learnt from him the ‘the Mische technique’ and in the October Barrett assisted Prof. Ernst Fuchs with working on a mural in the church of Sankt Aegid, Klagenfurt, Austria. In 2004 Barrett joined the Society for Art of Imagination in England and continued to assist and work with Ernst Fuchs during the Summer and Autumn months. Finally he returned to England in 2005, where he continues to paint in a small village of Pinner, Middlesex. (this is a small extract from the more complete Barrett’s biography on http://mitchbarrett.com/biography.htm
1) What it means to you about being an artist?
It is about giving everything to what you are expressing. It cannot be done half-hearted, or in a shallow way because then it would have no meaning. It cannot be more personal than that. So to me it is the difference between art and design. Design is compromised, to entice a buyer and create a market for a product, true art cannot be compromised. In the Fashion world it was about enticing buyers, I found it so much easier to wear a mask in that world, it wasn’t personal, was after all about what was fashionable. But as an artist I feel so much more vulnerable, especially because I am exposing what is behind that mask. I am revealing my soul, making it visible. Over the years as an artist, I admit that I have easily taken offence in the Art world by sceptics and critics, because what could be more personal than expressing emotions and the painful evolving of the soul. Also because I had chosen to ignore what is fashionable and an easy sell.
I think my father was perhaps one of my biggest critics, a talented man, but a very cynical, practical one. He once said to me when he looked at ‘Fear and the Voyeur’, the painting which I was working on at the time; “What gives you the right to expect people to want to hang your feelings on their walls?”
I didn’t answer him at the time, surprised by his cynicism and lack of encouragement. But then I realised that he was not the type of man to express his feelings, he never had, unless it was done in a sarcastic way. So this was my reason for painting, it was to express and communicate feelings that always too often remain hidden and not easily expressed in words. It didn’t matter if somebody wanted to hang the paintings on their walls or not. What was more important to me was an understanding, for the viewer also to be able to relate to those feelings, perhaps in some way for that person to be moved on a deeper level by the painting and then I felt that at least I was fulfilling my role as an artist.
The role of the artist I now believe as that of enlightening us through various media and communication within human society the pure identity of the soul.
As an artist I respond to everything around me which opens a door to an inner world. Where past, present and future intertwine, where the soul is revealed.
2) How important is the comparison with other artists?
I guess comparison is to be expected especially when as artists, we are all diving into the same Ocean of Creation, the Divine Collective Conscious. Perhaps there could even be a wealth of natural creative knowledge in a genetic social history that we all carry within us, so everything is shared and communicated at that deeper level? I like the idea of this accumulation of knowledge passed on through the centuries from artist to artist, but with the passage of time seeing from different perspectives and with different interpretations, possibly because of changes in our social evolution and maybe even in our Collective Soul evolution?
All artists influence other artists, borrow ideas, techniques and modify, its part of our natural learning ability. This can be applied to the basic rules of technique. Ernst Fuchs once said to me, “First learn the rules and then you can change the rules.” So really there isn’t anything that is totally original, as we also borrow from nature.
In the Fashion industry, cycles of styles are always coming back and borrowing from one decade of fashion to another. I know that I am even influenced by the environment and in each of the countries I have painted in, by the nature and the culture of that society. When I was living in Japan and Thailand it was a rich source of inspiration and even in Australia with the incredible landscape and the mystical designs on the rocks by the Aborigines. The environment has an effect on our senses, if we are not aware of our environment, then our creative spirit is not tuned in, it seems obvious that it affects the way that we perceive and how we interpret what is around us. Then there is also that connection to our inner Spiritual environment which becomes another journey of exploration and yet they are both connected. Inner and outer.
I believe that William Blake as a Visionary artist, will always be an inspiration. Just as much today, more than yesterday and even more than tomorrow, he will still open the doors and the windows of our Soul.
3) What could you tell us about your artistic experience with Ernst Fuchs?
I had known of the work of Ernst Fuchs for quite a long time before I actually had the opportunity to meet him. Whilst I had been exhibiting in Japan and Thailand, artists that I had met there, including an art dealer lent me some of their books of his paintings, perhaps because they had noticed some kind of similarity with our work.
When I actually did get to meet Ernst Fuchs in 2001, it was whilst I was a film student coming from Munich and through Richard Hartman, a writer friend and agent of his based in Germany. But it was not until I moved to Vienna that I had the rewarding opportunity to meet him a second time through the beautiful art dealer, Cornelia Eibl-Mensdorf. It seemed like a blessed miracle that after having to put my film studies to one side that I was now given the chance to study with a great Master in his studio in the South of France. It was in May 2002 that I was invited to stay in his villa, near Menton and in those beautiful surroundings, the privilege of learning from him his ‘Mische’ technique, an old Renaissance technique of using egg tempera and oil glazes.
It was the fulfilment of a dream and he was like a ‘wise, artistic Father’ to me, sharing important knowledge of the old masters, guiding and encouraging me. It seemed like a magical experience and more than an amazing compensation for all the negative and critical statements made by real father towards my work.
Then in October 2002, I was asked to assist him with his mammoth project, working on the mural in the church of Sankt Aegid, Klagenfurt, Austria. In the Summer and Autumn of 2004 I was back in the South of France in the villa and again assisting and working with him.
4) What’s your favourite artistic technique and how it helps you to express yourself?
I was taught two techniques by Prof.Ernst Fuchs. One was the more traditional approach of using egg tempera and oil glazes, which he called the ‘mische technique. This was a lengthy process, excellent for detail and good draughtsmanship.
Another technique I found out later from him whilst he was working on a series of paintings of flowers for an exhibition in Germany. I had already many years before I met him been working in a similar way with inks and acrylics in most of my backgrounds. I suppose it was called ‘marbling’ of splashing the inks and paints onto a watery background, sometimes spraying with a diffuser and letting the colours melt into each other creating forms from their mixing. Something I had known of Jackson Pollock to do by placing the canvas on the floor and splashing it with paint. I would spend sometimes two to three days doing that on a painting until I was satisfied with the colours and forms. I loved doing it because I would get covered in paint and it took me back to childhood.
Then with Prof. Fuchs it was a step further which he did with his flower paintings. Which was about allowing the imagination to see the shapes in the ‘marbling’, for instance of petals of flowers and then to bring them out and define them with the egg tempera. Bringing more shapes out and refining with oil glazes and more egg tempera. It didn’t just have to be flowers, more could be found amongst the shapes such as faces and human figures, even animals, anything. This was definitely my favourite technique because it allowed you to be more expressive and to let the imagination run wild.
5)Who are your favourite artists?
I have such a long list of favourite artists because I can find inspiration from different artists throughout history with their different styles. Each offers a different way of looking at things and expressing what they see with colour, rhythm of line, form, or whatever medium is chosen.
So of course William Blake, also Klimt, Monet, Rodin, Degas, Moreau, Dali and even Francis Bacon.
6) Why Visionary Art?
‘Visionary art’ is just another label. Such as Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism even Fantastic Realism. Just names that make it easier to fit a certain type of painting into a type of category. I know that when I am working on a painting, I don’t think, ‘this is going to be a Visionary painting, or done in the style of Symbolism, or Expressionism’, it simply is when it is true art flowing from the spirit and taking its own form. So to me it is more about exploring through Art an expression of feelings that touch the Soul.
Although I do think that when I did my first series of paintings they probably came under the label of Surrealism as I was very much influenced by Salvador Dali at the time. But really as I got more in touch with my feelings, it was more about ideas and images that flowed through me, a language that wished to be interpreted and reflected upon in a meaningful way. So it seemed as if they were ‘Visions of some kind’, because I was also learning something of myself on a much higher level. My consciousness was being raised and expanded from deep past experiences as symbolic and archetypal images were evolving from out of my sketchbook onto the canvas. It was as if as an artist I was a channel for mysterious, hidden messages from the Collective unconscious.
Also I had a lot of problems on a personal egoistic level, which was also a reflection of the superficial side of the Art market. I wanted to be recognised and appreciated for what I could create, as much if not more than when I was recognised and appreciated for just an outer image when I was a fashion model. It has taken me a long time to recognise that struggle, which I had explored whilst writing ‘The Dreams of Frankie Cameron’,
But it was not without a struggle, as two different worlds were caught in conflict, in our world of duality, wanting to be different, separate, but also wanting to belong. There was the ego of the artist, a (clown-like) decorative mask that we all tend to wear and its desire for recognition, hiding a child-like inquisitiveness. The child in me wanted to be released into a personal landscape, curious, and devoted as a pilgrim on a quest to reaching the source of the True Creation.
Between visions of the artist and the interpretations of an onlooker, stories unravel and ‘myths’ are told in an ongoing journey to expand horizons of consciousness. The Visionary artist’s motivation is to produce a spiritual awakening in the observer. Art then arises as a portal to the Spiritual and Divine, embracing both the Light and the Shadow.
7) What’s you’re The Dreams of Frankie Cameron project? Maybe you’ve the dreams of the fusion of the arts?
I am still currently working on a book project called ‘the Dreams of Frankie Cameron’ and it is very much a life-work as it also includes a lot of artwork along with the story.
It is a rich blend of myth and dark fantasy. A modern story, adapted from different sources, including the myth of Orpheus, Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, ‘The Fool’s Journey’ in the Tarot cards and a collection of subliminal messages from my paintings interwoven into this Faustian narrative.
It starts with Frankie Cameron an English artist living in Paris, the centre of Fashion and art. He is moderately well known, but still having not achieved the recognition he desired. With an upcoming exhibition and lacking any inspiration, pressure is soon put on him by his art dealer. She soon reminds him that his reputation is at stake, since he hasn’t produced any new and different paintings for quite some time and there are plenty of new and younger artists ready to take his place in the Gallery.
Frankie, desperate for an alternative source of inspiration, asks his girlfriend Tsuki, a Japanese-French fashion model on an assignment in the Amazon, to look for the indigenous ‘vine of the soul’. She returns to Paris with the seeds of the plant and after experiencing their hallucinogenic effect, he then decides to experiment and see if the effects could be taken further. He mixes the crushed seeds in with an old white powdered pigment that he had used during painting and creates a drug that manifests his dark night dreams and daydreams into paintings. Time is distorted and reality, whilst the drug brings him the recognition he had desired. Of course he had made sacrifices, including the loss of his fiancé, along with becoming addicted to the drug and the rise of his dark megalomaniac shadow side in the persona of a celebrity fashion designer.
These ideas had been in my subconscious for a long time through my experiences in the fashion and art world, along with some of the meanings I had found in some of my paintings. It is still a mammoth work in progress and had started as a dark and twisted story, but has developed over the years to discover answers to my own questions on the real value of art.
I do enjoy the fusion of the arts, especially when I can experiment with different media. I love most of the arts from music and dance, sculpture, literature and especially film. Such as when I made my first film to get me into film school in England. The film was shot in Bangkok in April 1997 after I had just completed an exhibition of my paintings with two renowned Thai artists. It was fundamentally done as a visual experiment and adapted from some of the story in’ Dreams of Frankie Cameron’. The character in the story whilst having a Tarot card reading, finds that Illusion and reality start to merge, in the domain of dreams within dreams.
It was probably one of the most rewarding and fulfilling projects that I have worked on, since I wrote it, storyboarded it, also designed the masks, produced, directed and acted in it. I guess it was also a great form of escapism whilst going through a difficult time.
8) You have been part of both the world of fashion as art. What they have in common and in what they are different?
As a former fashion model, when I was much younger and of course much slimmer and now as an artist for many years, I am familiar with both fields and fascinated to explore this symbiotic relationship of art and fashion. We are in an image conscious society in which people are also obsessed with youth and maintaining the appearance of youth and beauty for as long as possible.
During our time, it is becoming more apparent the connection between Art and fashion, both reflecting each other in a relationship which is ambivalent on so many levels. The attraction and repulsion in the hungry demand of society for commodity, glamour and icons has become embraced in our everyday existence. The media, television and the big screen have the biggest influence in determining our concepts of glamour, fashion and the cult of celebrity in a cultural overload, morphing our perceptions, judgments and ideologies. This phenomenon is not new, surfacing in the 1960′s with the observational art statements of Andy Warhol with his Marilyn Monroe prints, Campbell Soup Cans and Pop Art with its references to popular culture.
Now with reality TV and an abundant supply of Botox, our obsession for celebrity and even a Narcissistic desire for ‘self-celebrity’ is even more apparent. It has become a world where illusion and reality merge, feeding an addiction for the perfect figure and the perfect face.
Intrigued by this dark side of the beauty industry, also brought me into the distorted values in the Art world, which I have explored in ‘the Dreams of Frankie Cameron.
This compulsion for desires became even more apparent when I recently exhibited in Brighton in a new art gallery called appropriately Impure Art and focusing only on erotic art. I exhibited one of my paintings called ‘Playtime’. It’s the image of an over-sexed Teddy Bear being extremely intimate with an excited gorgeous female puppet, whilst her stockinged legs are spread wide open. Such distorted childish fantasies, but after all Sex sells! I am not knocking it just using that format to recognise the illusion.
The link with fashion and the media, creating a desire in the observer to possess that object, as a commodity or as a reflection of one’s ego. A Narcissistic ego disguised in the form of ‘art’ by a decorative mask. So art tells us about the world we live in, a Gustave Klimt painting sold for a 135 million dollars to the heir of the Estee Lauder Empire, Giorgio Armani putting on fashion shows at the Guggenheim museum in New York and one of Damien Hurt’s meaningless objects displayed in the Metropolitan museum.
So Art has become Impure in the modern day orgy of consumption and exposure and this has changed how we view it. Being born from the financial market, instead of Pure Art born from experience and deep meaning. To stimulate the eye, to move the mind and elevates the soul is what I believe is Pure Art and that is the difference to Fashion.
9) What do you think about the artistic trade?
To be honest I really don’t like the artistic trade at all, it’s pretentious and full of a lot of ‘bullshitters’ that have no idea of aesthetics. I have found it far too superficial, with too many clichéd groups determining to a gullable public ‘what is of value and what is not?’ But I think with the current economic recession it has possibly done a good thing to determine values on a different level and hopefully on a more meaningful level.
Art as a commodity took over from Art as Art in the 60′s, when it became collected exclusively for profit and its meaning staying behind. Then by the 80′s, Art became viewed purely, or not so purely for investment and only admired by the price tag it was given. So is the authority of the value of Art been given only to a cheque book?
Andy Warhol turned out to be a dull celebrity rather than a great artist, simply a businessman of mass production of ‘art?’ feeding the hungry ego machine of self- grandeur for the rich and ignorant. So what is Pure Art and Impure Art and also this link with Fashion?
possibly to show where our present day consciousness is at, whilst caught in a paradoxical world that becomes a slim line between objective reality and illusion. Embracing glamour, but also as a critique of Fashion’s play of demand and deviation, its compulsive pursuit of commodity, obsession with celebrity and its alluring distortion of fantasy.
10) Have you some advice for young artists?
Learn from the old masters as well as from nature. But most of all as Joseph Campbell, perhaps one of the greatest teachers of the meaning of myth said, “find your bliss”.
Excellent article. Mitch Barrett is a man of so many talents. I am proud to know him and have been able to display his work with my poetry. His art is inspiring to me and now I learn of even more facets of Mitch.