Barry Nemett: Paintings, Poems, & Passages

Whether he is drawing an old man waiting for his wife or a boxer waiting between rounds
creating a six-inch painting or a sixty-foot assemblage
welding a metal abstraction
carving stone
constructing a room-size installation
or writing a poem . . . the foundation of Barry Nemett's work has always been built upon rhythm. The rhythm of life. There is a focus on the rhythms built into every work Barry Nemett produces, just as there is a rhythm that flows from one of his works to another and between the various directions that his art has taken over the years. Likewise, in his representational images, there is an integrated rhythm of exchange between reality and imagination, between what the artist directly observes and what he invents. In addition to essays, poems, and brief commentaries by well known painters, poets, and critics, many of the 600+ full-color reproductions in this text are accompanied by the artist's poems and written reflections. The book also includes excerpts from his recently published novel, "Crooked Tracks" and from his textbook, "Images, Objects & Ideas." Designed to accompany a traveling exhibition of Nemett's work, this comprehensive survey weaves together the people, places, objects, and stories of animate and inanimate subjects that he has been portraying through words and pictures for the past forty years in his attempt to visualize life's unlikely rhythms and inevitable rhymes.