he world lost a beautiful, warm, generous, mischievous, wickedly smart and delightfully cantankerous soul the night of Saturday, April 2, when Oregon artist Rick Bartow passed away after battling congenital heart failure. He was 69. At EW, our hearts are full of sorrow. Bartow will be remembered for his mastery of color and gesture, and his spirited and unflinching work — paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture, found in museums and collections around the globe.
Words like “genius” and “fearless” are terms thrown around perhaps too casually in this world, but Bartow was both. I won’t pretend to know Bartow intimately after spending just one splendid day with him at his home and studios in Newport, and after long chats on the phone, a year ago, but I know enough to say that he didn’t give a shit what the world thought of him or his art, which made both all the more beautiful and urgent.
This is the artist who, when the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art opened the stunning and largest-ever retrospective on Bartow’s work a year ago this month, opted to play guitar with his band downstairs instead of hobnobbing in the gallery. Bartow had expressed to me several times he didn’t go in for any “woo-woo” crap — anything stinking of pretension or pomp and circumstance.
As his beloved friend and agent of more than two decades Charles Froelick told me last April: “He could give a rat’s ass about fame or what people think.”