BARRY BERG
Barry w mother, sister, grandmother
L-R Dave Gilovich, Sam George, Chris Carter & Barry Berg
Barry w mother, sister, grandmother
PERSONAL INTERVIEW BY JAMIE BRISICK
June 2023
“My art derives from the forms and situations of the coastal environment; an area of ephemerality and continuous change; a region where extremes meet; where one is always conscious of infinite relationships of light and movement. A thread running through my work has been the effect of seeing and experiencing things from above. The aerial overhead component allows for vibrant, undulating space to mentally visualize within. Influences of global crisis within the natural world also drive the work.”
So goes Barry Berg’s artist statement. And while that may be all you need to know as you peruse the works in
Over Head, Barry Berg’s first solo show with Cruise Control Contemporary, the story goes much deeper than that.
Barry enjoyed one of those free range, Lord of the Flies sort of childhoods in San Clemente, California. These were the 1950s, and there was a lot of open fields, a lot of beach, and a lot of great surfing, which he and his friends watched with glee, sensing that the ocean and waves would figure largely into their lives. For Barry it would eventually be a 24-year career at Surfing magazine as the Associate Publisher, Creative.
At age nine, Barry was peddling his Huffy bicycle home for dinner when he rounded a corner and ran head-on into a moving truck. The bicycle got eaten under the vehicle. Barry got thrown forty feet. He spent a month in the hospital with a skull fracture. When he got home, still recovering, he did a drawing of the accident—from a bird’s eye view.
“The accident gave me an incredible aspect on life: that I’m the luckiest guy in the world, and there’s never a bad day. But it also visually and perceptively changed me. I see things in a contrasting way when it comes to perspective,” says Barry.
Cut to the latter half of the 1960s when Barry serves four years in the Air Force. Among his various duties, one of them is to ride in the back of planes during their fuel tests, which had a clear plexiglass floor, i.e., a kind of aquarium-like view. “l would lay back there and just look at landscape from above for hours and hours and hours,” says Barry.
Over Head features paintings on gauze, paintings on canvas, assemblage, and found objects. It also features three large-scale paintings that Barry made for an exhibition in the 1980s. In the time that he began working on them to the opening of the show, his gallery moved to a new location. On the day of the install, Barry discovered that the work would not fit through the door, thus they’ve been sitting in his various studios for the last fifty years.
“One of the things I’ve always wanted my art to do is to break down people’s preconceived notions and to really get in their psyche in a different way. And that’s not an unusual thing; I think most artists want that. But mine has been generated from that overhead perspective.”
Jamie Brisick; author, writer, photographer;
works featured in The Surfer’s Journal, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Guardian.
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Voyager
2024, mixed media, .30” x 30”
VOYAGER COMMENTARY
September 2024
It’s as if "Voyager" has journeyed through time and space, collecting memories of the earth's shores and the ocean's depths, embodying an underwater creature that defies easy classification. It's not just a sculpture; it's an oracle—speaking to the ephemerality of life. The whitewash evokes a sense of cleansing, of returning to a primal state of being where all begins in purity and eventually circles back to it. Did the artist create "Voyager” to confront us with the truth that, like the ocean's endless rhythm, everything is cyclical? We are molded by the world's forces, broken apart, and ultimately reassembled in a quest for wholeness. It's a testament to the transient nature of existence—how we start in purity and inevitably return to it, regardless of the storms we endure along the way. In its scale and simplicity, I think "Voyager” is a quiet yet profound reminder of life's essence: that in all our complexities, we are, at our core, pure and ever transforming. And in that, we are all the same.
Michael Marckx; CEO Creative Disruption / Writer / TED Talks Speaker
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SELECTED ART REVIEW
Artweek
November 27, 1976 / Volume 7, Number 41, West Coast
Los Osos
1976, mixed media, .8” x 13”
Arnold Gallery, Newport Beach
BARRY BERG: Environmental Reference
I would like to think that the sounds people hear and a concert could make them more aware of the sound
they may hear in the street or out in the country or anywhere they may be. -John Cage
One might hope that the same could be said of the visual arts; that a painting’s qualities might make viewers more aware of what they see in the world around them. Such as the sentiment of Barry Berg and works he loosely terms “landscapes” at the Arnold Gallery. The show is called Southern Exposure, an apt, title for Berg‘s first one-man show and also a reference to San Clemente, his art environs.
Berg presents paintings on asbestos roof coating and paintings on gauze. Those in the first group range in size from about 6“ x 12“ to about 24” to 40.” Three of the four edges are straight, while the top edge appears to have been torn. Due to the choice of asbestos, the process by which the surface is prepared and the application of various types of paint, the works have a topographical appearance, as if presenting an aerial perspective of land. Cardboard is placed over the already sticky surface of backed asbestos roof coating. Then in a manner recalling print making, the cardboard is pulled away, causing the asbestos to stand away from its backing in small “hills and valleys.” This effect, plus the inherit characteristic of asbestos to buckle and sag upon contact with air, creates features much akin to actual geophysical phenomena.
Having grown up in San Clemente, where land and sea meet, Berg concentrates on an edge/margin/boundary concern, both physically and philosophically, in his work. He finds that his style of painting creates an art object and simultaneously furnishes a vehicle to express these concerns. In all the asbestos works, it is the edge that is a primary importance.
In Ding graduations of color from black through green and blue end in a dark torn edge. The shading along this edge is hazy, much like the unstable line between water and land. In other works, such as Behind the Orange Curtain, the edge, though jagged, is sharply defined with a strong orange line that suggests a border or boundary. The balance of the work incorporates mists of pale oranges and blues which Berg feels are typical of the bland southern California landscape.
Contrast this work with a Los Osos, the newest and smallest of the pieces that Berg exhibits, completed after a recent trip to Northern California. The colors are much more intense, the painting more detailed. Lush green “hills” and brilliant blue “lakes” compose a work that approaches an architect’s model of a proposed landscaping. The torn edge here is accented by a silver line that also seems to intimate an increased interest in light. Though all of Berg‘s topographical paintings illustrate his philosophical concerns, his newer works - those more concerned with color, light, and detail - are his strongest. They are also more closely allied with the second group of work presented, the acrylics on gauze.
Titled Vestiges, they are small pieces of gauze torn and stretched to yield tattered edges and a three-dimensional surface with intermittent holes where threads have been stretched apart. Here again, the uneven edge commands attention, and areas where the threads remain intact are filled with color. Berg searched for the lightest possible material that would support paint. However, one of these gauze pieces is titled Onus, as the paint still seems to “burden” in the material.
Berg’s gauze pieces are works that upon examination are environmental composites. Light and air or intrinsic to the material. Additions of earth browns, blues, and greens and yellows representative of dirt, water, foliage and sun are the elements that complete the ecological design.
Martha Spelman; Art Writer