Jack Barrett did not have an appointment when he and his wife marched into the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts and handed the chief curator a stack of Barrett's sketchbooks. He has filled hundreds over his lifetime, and considers them his most valuable work. He hoped to have them accepted for a one-man show, something that would secure him a place in history as a serious artist.
It is the last thing he wants before he dies.
"My dream is to have my work in a museum," Barrett says. "You feel like you've arrived."
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That dream has taken on special urgency for Barrett, 77. The local painter and illustrator is weakening after years of illness. He has cancer in both legs and a heart condition that affects his stomach and his lungs. The time he spends in his Salt Creek Artworks studio in southeast St. Petersburg has grown sporadic. Progress on an acrylic painting of a colorful and frenzied jazz scene has been slow.
Barrett is perhaps best known for his illustrations and portraits in the
St. Petersburg Times, where he worked as an artist for 20 years. Since he retired in 1990, he's become a fixture in the local art community. He has had more than 15 one-man gallery shows, mostly in Florida, and some in Canada and his native Pittsburgh. He has won several awards for his paintings and illustrations, including the 1974 Illustrator of the Year award from the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications, one of Barrett's greatest honors.
But he's never had his work hung in a museum. So whenever he can, he continues to paint and draw, sometimes even from his bed, looking for a legacy in his art.
A tall man with a full head of hair, Barrett towers over the stacks of paints, sketchbooks and canvases littered across his studio. He has grown so thin that he wears his blue jeans cinched tightly at the waist with a black leather belt. Even so, they sag, and his wife, Louise, tugs them up by the belt loops. When he is strong enough to visit his studio, she eases him from his wheelchair into a paint-spattered seat to work. When he is ready, he pushes up the sleeves of his baggy green sweatshirt and dabs layers of green onto a painting he had begun weeks before.
He has been getting radiation treatments daily this summer. And he has let friends know that his health is deteriorating.
"He just told me he was dying," says Pat Burgess, who owns Salt Creek Artworks, and has known Barrett since he started painting there 25 years ago. "I had no idea."
Barrett has been battling illness almost that entire time. He had the first of several open-heart surgeries in 1993. In 2000, Barrett had a heart valve replaced. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2004, and with another heart condition, pulmonary hypertension, in 2006. And now, the skin cancer in his legs.
Through it all, he has painted.
Barrett learned how to paint from an aunt when he was 7. He would spend his weekends in her three-story brownstone on the north side of Pittsburgh, watching her work.
His fascination soon expanded beyond painting to illustrating. One day when he was 10, Barrett skipped school and snuck into the offices of the
Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, where he staked out the desk of comic strip artist Cy Hungerford. When Hungerford left his desk for a moment, Barrett rifled through the artist's garbage can, hunting for discarded, crumpled gems. Hungerford caught Barrett in the act. But instead of kicking him out of his office, he befriended the fledgling artist.
Those early explorations would become a lifelong passion and profession. Barrett graduated from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in 1954. He began his career in the advertising industry, and moved on to comic strips and magazines. In 1970, Barrett joined the
St. Petersburg Times as an artist. For the next 20 years, he traveled the world, always with a sketchbook in hand. He drew Deng Xiaoping in China and Jimmy Carter in Washington, D.C. He met and made portraits of Liza Minnelli and Liberace.
"The very worst was Elvis Presley," Barrett says. "They were a bunch of rednecks."
As an artist, Barrett is known for his color and spontaneity. His abstract interpretations of landscapes and people are both bold and whimsical. He draws inspiration for them from his sketchbooks.
Barrett sketches everywhere. At home or the mall, at the beach or the busy Borders bookstore at Tyrone Boulevard. In 1967, Barrett drew a portrait for the circus, and was so inspired, he became a clown for two days. Clowns have been a regular motif in his work ever since.
"He has the most marvelous collection of sketchbooks," says Lennie Bennett, art critic for the
St. Petersburg Times. "They show that whenever possible he has always wanted to make art."
But Barrett says his family life suffered because of his passion to paint. He regrets not spending more time with his only daughter, Stephanie.
"I wasn't a very good father," Barrett says. "I was always working."
Stephanie Barrett-Klima, 51, has a different story. In the home she remembers, her father's art covered every surface.
"Growing up you'd be watching TV and you'd look over and he'd be sketching you," she says.
Barrett-Klima drew and painted as a child, but gave up the hobby in high school. She was never sure whether the praise she got from her teachers was for her talent or her father's reputation.
She and her husband are raising two children, ages 11 and 14, and Barrett-Klima works as an insurance agent. But she says she has felt the urge to start painting again. She recently set up an art room, much like her father's studio, in her house in St. Petersburg. She has put out canvases and paints. Now she waits for the right time to begin.
"It's probably because he's waning," she admits. "I feel a void there. A need."
The void Barrett wants to fill by being accepted for a museum showing will remain, at least for now. The Museum of Fine arts considered displaying his sketchbooks, but had to decline. The museum's practice is only to accept the work of artists who are nationally renowned, says chief curator Jennifer Hardin.
A year's worth of Barrett's paintings was honored in a one-man show in the galleries of the Salt Creek Artworks for five weeks this spring. And he continues to visit his studio, when health allows, to do what he has done his whole life.
Occasionally he ponders the other possibilities life might have held. He thinks he would have enjoyed being a performer. A character actor, maybe.
"I could have made it," he says one day over lunch with his wife.
"You made it," Louise assures him. "You still made it."
On a recent Saturday, while Barrett napped after radiation therapy, Louise Barrett went to Salt Creek Artworks to dismantle her husband's one-man show. A year's worth of work was taken down in 20 minutes.
A lifetime of his work, and art, will leave a legacy forever.
CORRECTION: Errors in this story were corrected on July 4, 2007. Barrett's retirement date, his job title and the description of his cancer treatment were inaccurate.
