As director of Patina Gallery, Ivan Barnett wears many hats, usually with jeans and a faded
t-shirt. He is more comfortable behind the scenes and is guided by a deeply honest nature. He knows what he likes, trusts his instincts and brings an artist’s trained eye to the assessment of work. He also cleans the windows, scours the sidewalk and does dishes. First and foremost, though, he is an accomplished artist.

Tonal Constructs is Barnett’s fourth exhibition at Patina and the latest in a career that spans almost four decades. Following graduation from the Philadelphia College of Art, Barnett was drafted into the US Army where he worked as an illustrator at the Pentagon. Once discharged, he avidly pursued his own work. By the mid-seventies, he had risen to prominence with a series of weather vanes based upon early American ones found throughout Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he made his home. He is one of the few living artists whose work is included in the Alexander Girard Collection of the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Barnett lives in Santa Fe, with his wife, Allison, and their three year old daughter, Grace. He maintains a large studio in his home but uses a friend’s more spacious one to create the works for this year’s event. These are the first purely sculptural pieces Barnett has presented at Patina. Past exhibitions featured more two dimensional collages and the mobiles for which he is well known.

Like most of Barnett’s earlier pieces, these works are constructions. New this time is his inclusion of found objects and wood. “I love the idea of taking something common and distorting it so that you don’t recognize it. I have an affinity for the common. Its grounding, less removed… And I love surprises, this thing that people have walked past, but I can take it and give it a new value and a new meaning.”

Barnett’s earlier works featured a toothy rusted steel that imparted graininess to the pigments he applied. These new works are composed of found wood shapes, sawn, altered and painted. “Wood is a more flexible material, I can use it much more loosely.”

Barnett’s formal training in fine art was just that, rigorous and formal. “I think great art is “great” for certain basic, classical reasons. ‘Art for art’s sake’ is not where I’m at. Rodin is great for a reason. There is a reason why there are ‘great works’ and they’re great because of universal principles of composition, of light, of movement, of proportion, of scale. These are the same principles that determine greatness in music, poetry, architecture…I don’t compare myself to great artists but I aspire to create great work.”

Barnett is thoughtful when discussing his own artistic process. It is, at all times, informed by strict standards of design and composition. “For me, who works in such a methodical way at the gallery…
I like the ability to be spontaneous. I like change and I have an obsession with proportion and spatial relationships. It’s what I do. It’s what I do professionally.”