BO BARTLETT

I have a particularly rich memory of hitchhiking across the panhandle and being picked up along the Forgotten Coast at midnight near Apalachicola by a carload of five young Black men. They were around my age, offered me a seat me in the back, and shared a meal of fresh steamed crabs as we drove through the night. I remember getting an education during that ride about the differences and similarities in our cultures. Our stories, our lives, our backgrounds, and our concerns varied. But that night, we were in it together. We sang, drank beer, and ate crab claws and threw the empty shells out the car window. We drove all night and parted company somewhere along western Highway 98 in the wee hours of the morning.

I wanted to paint a picture honoring those guys and the communion shared. The title comes from a small, abandoned mill town in Alabama.

The central figure is the protagonist of the scene, a young woman in a floral patterned dress. She is lit with emotion, glowing in the late afternoon sunlight.

There is an echo of the crowd in the James Ensor painting Christ’s Entry into Brussels (1888). There is also an echo of the Sidney Goodman painting Crowd Scene (1977-79), which shows a crowd looking away from the viewer and observing something not shown. Here, the telephone poles suggest crucifixes, raising the question, “What is the crowd witnessing?"

For me, the shark represents the unconscious, coming up from the deep, to bite those who are unaware. Last summer, we were in the Lower Harbor when we saw a shark strung up on a wharf on Matinicus.

I knew instantly that I wanted to paint it. In no time, word spread through radio waves, reaching every fisherman on his boat. They agreed to wait until the afternoon light before they filleted the shark. But first, they had to remove the heart to bleed the shark. All who participated volunteered to be in the painting: Troy Philbrook, Mark Ames, Danny Lewis, Josh Ames, and Blair Bemus. They moved into swift action, contributing their ancestral knowledge of the sea to the process. Every person had his talent, his skill, his contribution. Very little communication was necessary as they co-created and co- curated the tableaux. What struck me about that day was how self-organized the endeavor was, as each fisherman contributed his intrinsic knowledge of the sea. Later, shark steaks were given to everyone on the island.

Here we see the fishermen standing with the catch. Lobster traps are on the periphery. Troy’s dog stands in the foreground, empathetic and curious. On the left, George Tarkleson’s grandson watches me draw the scene.

The themes reoccur in real life and play out in art. I was thinking about Pablo Picasso’s fishing paintings from the South of France, American Gothic (1930) by Grant Wood and Watson and the Shark (1778) by John Singleton Copley. This is everyday life on an island 24 miles off the coast of Maine: real and rugged, life and death. But the inhabitants help one another and make a festival of these occurrences.

Set on a dam in the Chattahoochee River in southwest Georgia, the protagonist releases his child-self. He hears the mantra “Draw Out the Child” as he embarks on the hero’s journey to let go of all he has held on to so desperately, deeply nostalgic for what once was. It is a mise-en-scène for an Everyman facing the complexities of adulthood.

A light wind blows in from the east. The rising sun — perhaps the flood waters are still rising or receding. No one knows what we go through. Each are left to fight their battles alone. A small boat with a family rows slowly through the frame, right to left. Soon it will be gone, and another will pass slower in the distance.

Some things remain; some things are taken with us. Some things are useless, yet some things are indispensable. Pinks, green, and robin’s egg blue acutely alive and in it. There’s no time to consider or reconsider. We find our point of contact and we row, knowing still everything always lives in a precarious and ineffable uncertainty.