In March of 2025, two of Bo Bartlett‘s series, Summer and Home, were on view at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York. This work in particular, Saudade (with The Painter to the left and The Skippers on the right) has an unsettling quality- note the smoke in the distance.
From the gallery’s website-
This exhibition brings together works from two distinct but intimately connected series: his early “Home” paintings and the more recent “Summer” works. While deeply personal, these works invite viewers to reflect on universal themes—longing, nostalgia, and the sense of home—offering a moment of connection through shared human experience. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated digital publication featuring an essay by Patricia Junker.
As Patricia Junker writes, “Bartlett embraces what he calls his topophilia: More than a connection, it is love of place.” Take his work, Home, where “we feel the texture of a subject’s madras shorts, the elasticity of her red knit headband, the suppleness of her black leather ballet flats, cast aside, and the soothing feel of cool grass on her bare feet and its scratchiness on a boy’s knees and palms. We know that time of day when light can penetrate a white linen shirt just so, and we know the quiet that allows a tuckered-out child to lie listening, lost in thought, on the verge of dreamland, perhaps. We take stock and try to make sense of a strange scene—a house of dark windows, a searching youth who crawls to peer around a corner, a forthright young woman at the center, a still baby at the far right. It seems as real before us as life itself. It is at once familiar and curious, because, as Eudora Welty has aptly put it, ‘Life is strange. Art makes it more believably so.’”
