Gordon Barrick
The Artist and His Work
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The following article comments on Gordon Barrick's invention and use of 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.
Many of Gordon Barrick's winter landscapes were painted using the Winter Box.
The following article appeared in The Cleveland Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine Section one August Sunday during the 1930's.
The illustrations to the right were published with the original article. The other photo of Gordon Barrick and his Winter Box appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
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By Roelif Loveland (Staff Writer) with illustrations by Fred Reinert (Editorial Art Department)
Dolly was a nice bossy cow with brown hide and a nose like damp velvet. She chewed here Connecticut cud near the Massachusetts line and produced about 7200 pounds of milk a year just as a matter of course.
If she had put her mind on it, she probably could have boosted it a couple of hundred. But she wasn't that kind of cow.
She had some cousins living in Ohio but she hated to think of them. She clung to her eastern moo and climbed mountains and what not, and her owner said in great pride: "There's a cow."
But one day while Dolly was wandering over the face of her little earth she came upon a most delectable meal.
She found it in the woods, and she smacked her thick lips and she proceeded to eat. It was sweet, and she liked it.
But presently she felt her milk curdling and she felt very bad indeed and before long she fell down on the grass and started kicking and one of her kicks was her last. This was a sad end for such a very fine cow.
This was precisely the way her owner felt about it. He looked down at her sadly, and a frightful suspicion entered his mind.
He was, however, a Connecticut Yankee, and he didn't propose to go off half cocked. So he sent for the veterinarian, and that worthy fellow came with his tools.
The autopsy was performed then and there, and the cause of poor Dolly's death came to light. It was a cloth which still retained most of the colors of Joseph's coat.
"Some of these plagued artists have been around here," diagnosed the good doctor, "and one of 'em left his paint rag. Of course you know there's a lot of lead in oil paint -- enough to kill all the cows in the world. It tastes sweet, and the cows like it, and-well, what are you going to do with Dolly?"
And that, knights and ladies, is the reason artists still fight shy of that particular area.
Most artists are careful what they do with their paint rags, and one I know carefully stuffs them in his pocket and takes them home. That is, he used to.
One day his wife found them and suggested acidly that it might be just as well to bury them. The artist bowed meekly. He didn't tell here the story about poor Dolly.
The next time he followed her advice. He dug so deep that it took him quite half and hour, and after that he stamped down the soil and placed a few stones on top of it to be sure. He was exactly 40 minutes late to dinner, and was viewed with suspicion all evening.
Yes, I think one may say pretty broadly that artists have become safe and sane, with what almost might be termed a save-the-livestock complex.
In Provincetown, of course, artists are in the great majority, and the happy cows on the tip of Cape Cod are testimony immutable.
At Woodstock, N. Y., artists constitute the greater part of the summer population, but they all have milk to drink when they want it.
So much for the life problem of behaviorism.
To be sure, one hears a lot of artistic tales from the centers where art flourishes.
Every winter some tall yarn comes out of Colebrook, near the Massachusetts line -- tales like the one about a man who tied his horse and sleigh to a hitching post when he entered a store, and who are found it hanging from the top of a telegraph pole when he came out a few hours later after the wind had shifted.
Take no stock in them at all. The hibernating artists must have their fun.
Life, however, is not all fun for those who follow after the beautiful.
Consider the dangers which abound for those who rise early to paint the sun in its infancy; which exist for those who venture forth at noon and again at sunset.
They may be quite terrifying. Take, for example, the case of Gordon Barrick, one of Cleveland's fine artists whose sensitive soul would forego whatever distinction attaches to being boss of the Cleveland Plain Dealer's art department, if he could just get out and paint from sunup to sundown.
Well, not so very long ago, Artist Barrick started out one morning for the Big Creek area of the Cleveland Metropolitan Park System, a favorite haunt of Cleveland artists.
His eyes took in the varieties of the landscape and the bubbling water, and he sighed. He was debating whether to paint the water or whether to have his landscape dry, and while he was cogitating he saw a large hump near the top of the hill.
He hadn't seen it before, and it intrigued him. So clambered over the rail fence, and this was no mean thing because he was carrying his easel, his stool and his portfolio.
He glanced at his watch, saw that he'd have three hours to work, and feeling quite at peace he started up this hill. He stopped suddenly.
From over the top of the hill came a bellowing red bull the fourteenth cousin, twenty times removed, of the late Dolly.
He recognized an artist in the offing and he roared for vengeance. That Barrick was in no ways responsible for Dolly's death made no difference to him.
He shook his head and his bellow shook the hills, and he plowed along like the Twentieth Century going down grade.
Artist Barrick did not hesitate. Clinging tightly to his easel, his stool and his portfolio, he made tracks for the fence.
He ran so fast that the grass smoked where his feet touched it and he did not stop until a sailor's dive carried him over to the other side.
He beat the bull by twenty paces -- and the bull knew he was licked. He continued to shake his horns and to bellow.
Artist Barrick flushed but determined, picked up his easel, his stool and his portfolio and stood for a less bullish sector.
But it is interesting to know that the old wheeze about the bull after the artist really does happen on occasion.
Bulls are not the only aggressors. Artists have been pursued by bears in any number of woods.
They have, in fact, been chased by so many awful creatures that they have built up an unwritten law that no artist who is at all sporting will ever come home without what he started with.
Let the bears growl and snarl -- but hang on to your stool, your easel and your portfolio.
Perhaps the fact that paint is so frightfully expensive has something to do with it.
Often have artists been envied by people who consider their own jobs less interesting, and it is true that on occasion the life of an artist seems glamorous.
But what about the artist who goes out on dreary winter days to follow his profession?
Why doesn't some artist paint a picture of an artist who is painting a picture in zero weather?
In this connection, may I refer again to Artist Barrick not only because he paints the kind of pictures I should like to have, but because he is a practical man in addition.
In a way he is a pioneer in winter painting in comfort.
"It would be much easier" Barrick said to himself one cold winter day as he went shivering home, carrying his easel, stool and portfolio, "It would be much easier if one could sit back in his studio and paint cotton make it look like snow. But this can't be done. You have to go out and see it and stay with it until you get it down on canvas or paper. But it's absurd to freeze like this."
Then suddenly, as he went crunching along, Mr. Barrick had an inspiration. "I'll make a large glass-covered box to work in," said Mr. Barrick, "and I'll heat it with an oil burner"
He went home and built his box. A very novel box it was, too, with a thick glass top, and an oil burner inside it.
One side of the box was constructed of heavy fabric, and this had two armholes in it, and there was enough loose materials in this side of the box so that he could move his arms freely.
To be sure it made more to carry in case a bull attacked -- but in zero weather bulls are sort of frozen up, and their leg action is slow.
It was three years ago that Barrick made his invention, and he has painted in comfort (as far as his hands are concerned) ever since.
His feet still get cold, but a man has to be prepared to suffer somewhat for art.
The first time he took out his invention he turned the burner up too high, and the glass got very warm. A thwarted Providence, seeing a painter painting in comfort, turned on the snow which fell on the hot glass top of Mr. Barrick's painting box ... and the glass cracked.
But it has been repaired, and it never has cracked again.
By the use of this device Barrick has discovered that he is able to do finer work with water colors in winter than in summer. In summer the colors dry too quickly, and in winter, without the box, the freeze. With the box they neither freeze nor dry too rapidly.
The question of dressing for a winter sketching trip is a big one. Frankly, shorts aren't warm enough.
When Barrick goes forth to paint in zero temperatures he wears what any civilized man would wear to work plus another suit of long wooly underwear; another pair of long lumberjack's socks; a second pair of trousers (this one corduroy); a couple of sweaters; an additional coat; a stocking cap which goes over his ears; a cap which covers the top of the stocking cap; and last, but highly important, a pair of four-buckle artics.
From time to time startled rabbits peer from behind shrubs and watch with fascination a greatly bundled figure who is jumping around at a great rate, slapping his arms against his sides and puffing like the Betsy Ann, starting up the Ohio.
Sometimes they will be able to see only his eyes -- the rest of his face will be covered with a woolen helmet.
Take a tip, little rabbits. That will be Gordon Barrick. And when a guy goes to that pains to paint snow that looks like snow through the paradoxical expedient of painting everything else but the snow, he doesn't want to be annoyed by a lot of dizzy rabbits.
Back to your holes, lads, or -- if you must watch -- just peep around the corners. As soon as he gets the blood moving he'll go back to his box.
