Gordon Barrick
The Artist and His Work
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Gordon Barrick was a noted Cleveland artist whose known body of art encompasses works in landscape, portrait, and still life.
In addition, his work for the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper includes countless watercolor illustrations and sketches.
Gordon Barrick inherited a keen appreciation of art and a desire to make it a life work from his maternal grandfather, John Baptiste DeRussy (1810-1897)
DeRussy studied art while in a monastery in Canada, ground his own paints, and traveled from city to city in this country as a portrait painter.
A graduate of The Cleveland School of Art, now The Cleveland Institute of Art, he studied for two years in New York, at the New York School of Illustration and at The Art Students League.
Artists under whom he studied included such notables as Thomas Fogarty, Frank Dumond, Dimitri Romanovski, Robert Henri, and Frederick Carl Gottwald.
Gordon Barrick joined the Editorial Art Department of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1911 and served its Director for 24 years, from 1918 until his death in 1942.
Gordon Barrick painted extensively outdoors in the cold Ohio winters.
An innovator, Barrick invented what he called The Winter Box.
The Winter Box was a heated, enclosed box mounted atop an easel that would help keep the artist's hands warm during long winter outdoor painting sessions.
Gordon Barrick had a long and sustained association with the Cleveland Museum of Art May Show from its beginning in 1919 through 1934.
Some 40 pieces were exhibited at 14 annual May Shows during this 15-year period.
One of his first entries in 1919, an oil painting titled "Early Snow", won first price in the Landscape category.
In 1920, Gordon Barrick held his first exhibition at the Cleveland School of Art.
A Reviewer in the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote "There is much of the atmosphere and feeling of the real outdoors which is so painfully wanting in many canvasses done by painters of the so-called Hudson river school, who were much given to similar subjects."
"That touch of real nature, of the actual breath of the wide open spaces far from the dwellings of men, marks Mr. Barrick's landscapes, whatever the season or the topography of the scene."
Commenting after his death, one writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer summarized "For he was a first rate artist who loved to work and teach, but most of all, when he had a chance, to go out in the woods and paint."
