Boats on Faina

Devotion and redemption in Barrett

Who am I, if not a tormented being, like all the men, that only wants to paint, that is not mediocre only when he is painting? Who am I, if not someone that dreams with better days, for himself, for his family and friends and for his painting, and his way of talking, of communicating and his way to be in life? At the end, who am I?
Michael Barrett

In Michael Barrett we experience the spiritual freedom in a monochromatic palette of intimacy or an intense polychromy, where the divine and the human, in symbiosis, carry, in an almost brutal way, flowers sprouting in orgies of brush strokes to a God who is the Being: He and the Peers. A nonexistent scholarship, but latent in mastery that involves us in his History...
The devotion to himself that reflected, by the women he loved, by the painting of multiple orgasms, unique moments of creative ecstasy, by food that never satisfied him!... Redemption to sex and to a god who persisted in not knowing... to fishing in the quay, the daily life of Cascais, Buarcos or Aveiro...
In Michael Barrett sin is not to a god but to men and women who are his fundamental element of life ... People passing or staying, I love you Marie Louise / I don't want to die! Krishna / Ciao, life as it is, without lees... before coffee stains that matter and end as watercolor of the World that he longs to find out, but the journey he denies!
Place du Tertre, in a trace that leads us to a moment between artists, with his easel, in a city where it was conceived. Sin? Destiny that draws in a Modern Impressionism. Evasions... maybe himself, from this perfect predestined end, from pre-concepts that he choppes so that they free themselves, dreaming for acquittal, as “Homem da Sé”, or the “Pescador”, or Barrett or declaration of eternal love to Marie Louise.
Acquittal by a God, “King of Jews” that “Vamos Espezinhumilhá-lo!” Or by yourself, in a street of Cascais, at a glance over Costa Nova or over the Aveiro salterns. But always the fascination for the historical urbanism, such as the Pena Palace and the nature of the estuary.
A Modern Impressionism that takes from Van Gogh, Cezanne and Gauguin (post-Impressionists which he admires and treats as masters), of whom he speaks in the text that we have inherited in the work Island of Lesbos, where he bluntly expresses his conceptual concern, in a maturity which does not required but can sensed in a free divine being!
And Fernando Pessoa... always the Poet. In an impressionist devotion, but in a redemption for the Man. Essence of vanity and shame... such spirit in Barrett: Restless, fickle, restless ... but, undoubtedly, Human! His calvary: his own, as all! However, conscientious in his painting and artistic production.

Vieira Duque
Coimbra, 25/03/2015, 01:55
Good evening, Barrett

Michael Nicholas Barrett was born in Paris on February 13, 1926 (English mother - Dorothy Alice Barrett - and French father). Come to Portugal at the age of nine. It was the architect Gil Grace who encouraged him for painting. He died on May 6, 2004, in Cascais.
He married Marie Louise Forsberg, Swedish, in 1961, with whom he had two sons, John Nicholas (born in 1961) and Teresa Cristina (born in 1963).
From the 70s, 20th century, he spent long periods of time in Aveiro. In the 90s, he moved to Buarcos where Marie Louise died.