Current Exhibition

January 9 - March 13

Outbreak: Plagues That Changed History

Paintings by Bryn Barnard

Just in time for the flu season, the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center opens a new exhibition titled Outbreak: Plagues That Changed History with a reception for the artist on January 9 from 2-4 pm. That artist is San Juan Island–based Bryn Barnard and the title of the exhibition is the same as that of his 2005 book published by Crown Publishers Random House.

The show presents a close-up introduction to the book and includes the full suite of thirty original paintings that are reproduced as Outbreak’s illustrations, as well as historical maps and excerpts of text that unfold fascinating scenes, tracing the impact of some of the deadliest infectious diseases upon whole societies.

How the Black Death smashed feudal Europe, how yellow fever stopped slavery, how cholera cleaned up cities, and how tuberculosis changed from chic to shameful are some of the intriguing headings of chapters that describe how epidemics sometimes steer the course of history.

“Barnard’s basic premise is that diseases don’t affect just one person’s life — sometimes they change the world,” said PAFAC director and curator, Jake Seniuk.

Aimed at a youth audience the pace is peppy and the tone is casual but revealing, not unlike a website that has jumped to the printed page. Equally adept with pen/keyboard as well as brush, Barnard’s commentary is both lucid and chatty, and his sleuth-like pacing and plot development will engage readers whose attention span has been weaned on CSI TV (as in Crime Scene Investigations).

“Most of what’s actually happening in Outbreak is taking place at the microbial level and is invisible to the naked eye. Often the results are next to invisible in our grasp of history, which focuses on deeds and personalities, treaties and manifestos,” said Seniuk. “Bryn Barnard’s paintings and words bring light to invisible powers that operate beyond man’s control and remind us how fragile is our place in nature.”

An example close to home here is in a chapter titled Empires of Infection: How smallpox conquered the world. The arrival of Europeans in the New World was like the detonation of a biological bomb. From Columbus’s first landing, and subsequent incursions of the disease, smallpox was a central paradigm of the European conquest of the Americas, waging spontaneous and – too often – intentional biological warfare against unvaccinated indigenous populations.

When Captain George Vancouver sought a Northwest Passage in 1792 he was awed by the natural beauty sweeping by his sails, and as often shocked by what he encountered on the shore. In this splendorous and bountiful habitat, where the current inhabitants had obviously once prospered, his expedition found many human skeletons on the beaches and “whole deserted villages large enough for 400-500 inhabitants in perfect ruins.” Among the remaining natives they encountered many with faces pockmarked and often characteristically blinded in one disfigured eye by the disease. After a three centuries-long creep of contagion across the hemisphere, smallpox had discovered the antibody-bereft Northwest locals years before Vancouver’s HMS Discovery ploughed the Straits of Juan de Fuca and Georgia.

Barnard illustrates the scene of the Discovery drawing close to a ghost village along the Salish shoreline. Painted in a ruddy palette that clothes the scene in a veil of contamination, the only life to be seen is in the stern faces of the ancestral totem poles that line the deserted beach like solemn witnesses.

“It is Barnard’s keen awareness of the art history that parallels the events’ history, which makes these works engaging, even minus text,” Said Seniuk. “His tight compositions are packed with visual information yet don’t seem cluttered, and provide provocative highlights that draw us rapt into the text.”

“The show was featured at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. last year, and was so popular that its original three month run was extended to five. We’re happy that Olympic Medical Center has partnered with us to present the Northwest premier of the exhibition. I think the show has a lot to say about the evolution of public health in response to disease, and should be of great interest to the medical community.”

Barnard, a dynamic speaker whose knowledge ranges across science and philosophy as well as the arts, will present a Powerpoint lecture on his work and the show’s themes on January 30 at 2pm.

About Bryn Barnard:

Born in Los Angeles in 1956, Barnard was raised in the self-styled art colony of Laguna Beach in its synergistic low-rent era. The rotating oceanside art fairs – and especially the Pageant of the Masters tableaux vivant wherein live actors reenacted famous masterpiece paintings – made indelible impressions that informed his later pictorial turns of fantasy.

In 1973 he traveled to Malaysia as a high school exchange student, and the art and spirit of that country have brought him back again and again: to study batik and perform with a shadow puppet theater troupe (1977–78), to investigate the art and ethos of intercultural advertising (1981–84), and as a Fulbright fellow (1999 – 2000), to paint, draw, and lecture on illustration and design at the Universiti Sains [University of Science] in Penang.

On the American side of his education Barnard established a humanist base for his life’s work with studies in history, anthropology and the sciences at UC Irvine (1974–5) and UC Berkeley, where he completed a B.A. in studio art and Asian studies and honed his formidable illustrative powers at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (1979–81), with the conviction that a livelihood capable of supporting a family could be carved out in the publishing world.

Barnard’s mixed-media methods draw on both manually fashioned and computer generated elements, incorporating acrylic, oil, transfer, and digital imagery. His oeuvre spans a range of genres from children’s book illustrations, to magic realist landscape paintings and murals, to scientific and historical tableaux.

His work has been critically recognized for its ability to expand and enhance the texts it accompanies, helping young readers visualize worlds far away in place and time.

He has, as well, created images for science fiction book covers and select illustrations for many anthologies and magazine clients such as National Geographic. And he has jumped to the walls as a public artist. Between 2004 and 2006 he completed two commissions for Northwest Children’s Hospital in Seattle, in which he painted 200 lineal feet of murals designed to foster a sense of empathy and peace, a healing atmosphere.

A master of scientific illustration, Barnard has painted historical reconstructions for the National Geographic Society. He has received five commissions from NASA, for whom he documented the deployment of the Hubble Space telescope from the Space Shuttle, the testing of the Shuttle engines at Stennis Space Center, the Galileo mission preparation at the Kennedy Space Center, and the Landsat satellite program.

An eloquent and inspiring lecturer, Barnard spent five years in academia as an assistant professor of art at the University of Delaware (1991–95) and as senior lecturer on illustration at the University ofthe Arts, Philadelphia (1994–96).

He has resided on reclusive San Juan Island since 1995 while conducting an active career as illustrator and author.