Barrot Rendleman’s art exposes a dark beauty
In our age of excessive documentation, when every smart phone camera is a fountain of objectivity, it can be incredibly refreshing to find art that seeks to subvert the literal. Barrot Rendleman accomplishes this with painting and photography, capturing fleeting moments and deep emotions rather than concrete subjects.
Meanwhile, his writing and poetry are straight to the point, unapologetically sharing thoughts and feelings that are beautiful in their darkness. Rendleman has been writing since childhood: “I guess I thought that was what smart grown-ups did, read books and write stories.”
He began realizing in his early twenties that his writing was very visual.
“I would see everything out in front of me, almost like watching a movie, and I would write it down,” he says. “That process became too slow for me. I wanted to find a way to express things more immediately and more visually.”
This desire led him to photography, where he endeavors to record a memory as you would see it in your mind.
“When I look at a subject,” he explains, “I see it as a black lightless field, and see things with the light coming through the blackness. When I shoot, I always underexpose; I shoot way low so I can use a longer shutter speed to catch motion, not just the motion of the object I’m photographing but the motion of me moving around. I want to catch the movement of the object and the work of taking the photograph. Later when I go to process it is when I add the light and bring the exposure up.”
Rendleman uses a digital camera with no flash, and short lenses—he prefers 50mm because it is similar to the way the human eye works.
“When I shoot underexposed pictures and bring that to the computer, I can control the exposure and increase the contrast and texture.”
As his photography evolved, he discovered that there were things that he wanted to describe visually that he couldn’t do with a photograph.
“I started moving towards drawing with ink and really thin colors. Wanting to bring more emotion to it, I began using acrylic,” he says. “This emotional use of color sticks with me, and informs me slowly that I can bring things out with color and texture, be deeper and say more with painting.”
His paintings depict broad spaces of color, dramatic shading and color interaction. Many of them reference the post-war era and the nuclear age, using smooth blends of color and stark compositions.
Almost all of his paintings start out as drawings. He tells us, “They are the products of meditations and dreams, waking up in the morning, taking time to sit—they come to me like visions, particular color schemes and compositions.”
“Sometimes it is really vague,” he continues. “I start with broad fields of color, using acrylic, rarely using a brush. I use my hands or a palette knife, moving around large chunks of paint, almost like sculpting, moving color into the surface and manipulating the texture and shape of it with other colors. Once the composition and color are right, it becomes an emotional, almost sensual act of describing what is in my head—and showing the act of making it.
“The act of doing it is part of the experience of seeing it, more in painting than in drawing. Working with pens and colored pencils are more specific, and the act of doing it doesn’t come through as much.”
As his visual art describes the intangible, his words become more objective. “My writing these days is very straightforward,” he says. “When I was younger, I was more into experimental style—I would try to mimic how people I liked wrote, as I was trying to find a style of writing.
“It came out of not having much to say. I tried to cover up my lack of experience and lack of substance in my writing with an off-the-wall writing style. Now I have been around a little bit—I have things to say, so my writing style has calmed down, and is a lot more minimal. I say things as succinctly as possible, rather than trying to impress somebody with my vocabulary or how I can put a sentence together.”
Rendleman continues to explore photography and painting—he is in the early stages of a studio photography portrait project, and is painting abstract landscapes that are empty of human interaction—his way of addressing a looming fear of environmental devastation.
“I do not see the world as dependent on us,” he says, “but us as dependent on the world.”
See more of his work and photomagazines at burntbridges.net