Rising artist Rick Bartow draws from a troubled past to create work that has brought international attention

The worst thing about Rick Bartow is, he plays pretty good rock 'n' roll, too. Just about any Thursday night, you'll find him fingerpicking and bottlenecking his resonator acoustic guitar at Mo's Annex, a waterfront tourist restaurant and local hangout here, fronting a group that's just put out its second CD and is even talking Eurotour. Chances are, though, if you've heard the name Rick Bartow, it's not as a lead guitarist.

Bartow, 55, is one of Oregon's rising visual art stars - a dark, exuberant visionary whose imagery has been compared to that of English painter Francis Bacon or French symbolist Odilon Redon. Working primarily in pastel on paper, with occasional forays into wood carving and even dry point etching, Bartow steadily has gathered a regional, national and international following for his brooding, evanescent images of deer and coyote, raven and hawk, each one suffused with a sense of shattered autobiography. A hawk-nosed man himself - with gray hair, sharp eyes and an inquisitive, youthful energy about him - Bartow in the last decade has had solo exhibitions in Europe and Japan, New Zealand and Canada. His work has been collected by the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Ariz., the Portland Art Museum, the Microsoft Corporation and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, which awarded him a prestigious and lucrative fellowship last year.

None of this, happily, seems to have gone to Bartow's head. He still lives - as he has for most of his life - on the tumbledown homestead that his grandfather, John Bartow, a Yurok Indian from northern California, established on Yaquina Bay in South Beach, Oregon. Here, a collection of shacks, sheds, trailers and two more or less legitimate old houses next to the water give the impression that it takes a whole village to maintain this particular artist.

It was rock 'n' roll that brought Bartow his first taste of salvation, three decades ago in Vietnam. He had grown up on the coast, an odd, artistic kid, drawing and painting even then. His father died when he was 5, succumbing to alcoholism. But his mother remarried, and she and his stepfather gave Bartow a decent life. A sister who went to college introduced him to art beyond his adolescent doodles, but Bartow rarely thought then of art as a career. He went to college at Western Oregon State College, getting a bachelor's degree in 1969, expecting to teach. And then he was drafted and sent to Vietnam, finding himself in the middle of a war zone with a job - teletype operator - that he was never called on to do. He started playing guitar for diversion, for fun, for drinks, for good times. He played officers' clubs and after-work parties.

Then, he started playing in military hospitals, drinking all day long and pounding out Buffalo Springfield songs as the enormity of the war crowded in on him. He never saw combat, but in hospital wards he was surrounded by its aftermath. "It was years later I realized most of the people were probably already dead that I saw," he says now. "They were living on morphine. They were doped out to the max to keep them together."

Bartow made good music, and soon the Army was sending him around with his guitar to boost soldiers' morale. He played at fire bases for doomed helicopter pilots - young faces new with every show. He played for isolated units where soldiers were murdering their officers. He came home a 21-year-old drunk. Bartow tells his drinking stories openly, but without special fascination. A drunk, he seems to say, is just another drunk. A Bronze Star followed him home, commending his musical service to the troops. He threw it out. His mother retrieved it. He was mean and crazy when he came back to South Beach and didn't care who knew it. He spent some years - and a couple of marriages, as well - in a haze. Finally, he skidded to a stop.

"A local man saved my life, basically, kicking me pretty well down the waterfront with his cowboy boots," he explained over lunch at a Korean vegetarian restaurant he favors in Newport. The owners' preschool son talked and played with the artist delightedly as we ate, and Bartow never turned his attention far from the smiling child. "I was horrified and embarrassed to realize I had hit bottom. I stumbled home a bloody mess. I woke up with the pillow stuck to my face. Knots all over the top of my head, one eye closed, teeth busted. Everything you look like after a good drunken brawl. I needed a lesson." With a friend's prodding, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Fourteen years later, he's still clean.

Though today he could afford to build an artist's dream studio, Bartow still works in a series of tiny spaces scattered around the family homestead. He does small drawings at a boxlike table in one end of what might pass for a low-end garden shed. He carves in a separate wood shop, which is large enough to hold Bartow and his work and not much more. There, he shows off a savagely weird stuffed fox, a moth-eaten taxidermy specimen abandoned by a local museum. With sticks and paper and white spray paint, he's turned a tired natural history exhibit into the foundation of a nightmare. Bartow often draws big - some images are taller than he is - and he's recently cleared out room-sized space in one shed, where he can work on three floor-to-ceiling pastel paintings at once. But this particular week, he's spending most of his time in the print studio, an ancient, aluminum- skinned vacation trailer where the front room is dominated by a brand-new printing press - bought with the fellowship money - and an old, coughing wood stove. There, Bartow and a friend, Japanese fine-art printer and gallery owner Seiichi Hiroshima, are inking plates and pulling prints of some of the artist's most recent work - small, intense, monochromatic drawings engraved directly into plastic or copper plates. Hiroshima, who prints Bartow's work in Japan, came to stay with the artist and run the press here for several weeks.

Large or small, painted or printed, two dimensional or three, Bartow's images come from some deep and affecting mythological spot where faces and personalities merge and blur. He talks of the spirit coming in through one ear and going out the other; the artist, he says, can only try to grab hold for a moment. He often combines animal and human faces in a single image, as though different aspects of reality were struggling with each other. Though he works in many media, Bartow's pastels may be his most fully developed form. Typically large and exuberant, with enormous fields of rough color, they often pull the viewer into pairs of faces: one human, the other animal. In his 1995 pastel "Salmon Chant," for example, a man's face looks out from behind several hands that are then woven into the body of a salmon, the dominant shape in the painting. Bartow refers to these images in terms of masks - he also makes a lot of three-dimensional masks - and explains, a little glibly, that the masks have something to do with his own past life and its layers of concealment.

Death has continually haunted Bartow's life. One of his most significant art mentors and supporters was Portland gallery owner William Jamison, who died of AIDS in 1995. Three years ago, Bartow's third wife, Julie Swan, died quite suddenly of breast cancer, leaving him alone with their son, Booker, who is now 16. The artist was devastated. "Nothing happened in my life until I had a family. I would go out and I couldn't sleep because I didn't have the burbling, farting, snoring, sneezing family around me. I found it difficult to do anything without them. When my wife left, I was like someone who had lost one of my legs and can only hop around in circles. I was like a rudderless boat." He pulled through, as he always has in life, with the help of friends. Bartow recently remarried, this time to Karla Edwards, a woman his late wife had hired to help counsel their son during her illness. Edwards is now pregnant, and Bartow is on the verge of creating a new family life around himself.

Bartow preaches a gospel of the importance of family and friends. It has been friends who have pulled him out of drunkenness into art, and through successive personal tragedies. One recent night at the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem, where Bartow's work was being shown this winter, he and a new friend, writer Barry Lopez, addressed a Friday night crowd of art fans. Lopez talked in paragraphs about the importance of the natural world while Bartow told rambling but mesmerizing stories about nature and spirit, an Indian powwow and maintaining respect for elders. At the end, the artist rose, called his gray-haired mother to the stage, introduced her to the crowd, and presented Lopez with a veteran's cap to which he had affixed the Bronze Star that his mother had once rescued.

Then, still standing in front of the crowd, he began a simple, solo chant, a musical, melodious and animal-like sound.

March 24, 2002