The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Paintings come to life
Georgia painter’s film blends autobiography and fiction
For decades Columbus, Georgia-based painter Bo Bartlett has practiced a form of gorgeously rendered realism.
His paintings are epic, theatrical and often feature a kind of uncanny Americana reminiscent of the work of Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell and George Tooker but with a distinctly magical realist edge.
His paintings have been collected by museums and exhibited in galleries around the country. One, “Leviathan,” a characteristically surreal, unsettling image of a beached whale whose bloody interior holds a young man (Bartlett’s son Man), will be included in an upcoming exhibition “Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism” at the Georgia Museum of Art.
Bartlett’s artistic skill has allowed him to travel the world, meet fascinating people like film producer Dino De Laurentiis, director M. Night Shyamalan and actor Dennis Hopper (the latter both collectors of his work) and even his art world hero, the autobiographical realist Andrew Wyeth.
In 1996 Bartlett made Wyeth the subject of his first film effort, a documentary narrated by actor Stacy Keach, “Snow Hill.”
When he was studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Bartlett says, “I had a dream that my paintings started moving.”
“Perhaps it was just an inner need to push the visual image further,” says Bartlett.
Now, after this long and distinguished career in the visual arts, Bartlett has tested his creative mettle in a new realm. His 35-years-in-the-making film debut of “Things Don’t Stay Fixed” is the product of a long desire to see his paintings “move,” he says.
Written by former Alliance Theatre artistic director Sandra Deer and starring Atlanta actors Brenda Bynum, Tara Ochs, Melissa Saintamand and Desi Evans, “Things Don’t Stay Fixed” centers on a restless photographer Sam Grace (William Gregory Lee) who returns to his Southern hometown. He hopes to stop his daughter Nina (Saint-amand) from what he sees as a misguided marriage.
Against the backdrop of a grand antebellum home, where his mother-in-law Agnes (Bynum) and sister-in-law Kate (Ochs) and Nina all live, Sam contemplates past tragedies including the longago death of his wife. The dramatic final act steeps the film in an air-of-mythic tragedy in keeping with the mood of Bartlett’s paintings and the film melodramas of Douglas Sirk, mixed with bursts of the kind of southern whimsy found in Flannery O’connor’s “Wise Blood.”
It’s hard to miss the connections between Sam Grace and Bartlett. Both have a thing for white oxford shirts and khakis. And Sam returns to his wife’s family home much in the way Bartlett, and his artist wife Betsy Eby returned to Columbus in 2012 to live in Bartlett’s childhood home.
“Andrew Wyeth taught me how to be inspired by your own life, by your experiences, and how to get it into the work,” says Bartlett.
And the sense of loss that hangs over “Things Don’t Stay Fixed” has also played a part in Bartlett’s life. He lost his youngest son Eliot, at age 27 from an accidental overdose. “It was one of the things that catapulted me into going ahead and making the film. I needed a project to dive into, to get lost in,” he says.
The film is, as you would expect from a painter of Bartlett’s skill, visually accomplished — a bit grandiose — with a romantic, timeless vision of the South.
“At its heart, this is a film about grief, and finding joy and beauty in the midst of it,” says star Saint-amand (“Ozark”), who also grew up in Columbus and now lives in Reynoldstown.
Bartlett says he always knew the film had to be set in Columbus because of its influence on his own life and art. “The light is gorgeous,” he says, “like nowhere else in the world,” says Bartlett, who has had the good fortune to study the effect of light in Florence, coastal Maine and the Middle East.
Saint-amand agrees: “To me, Columbus has always had a little bit of magic that I have yet to find anywhere else.”
Tara Ochs (“Selma”) definitely sees the connection between place, paintings and film: “It’s maybe a little like Bo’s paintings,” she says. “He just sees beauty in every human moment, no matter how imperfect.”
Before he began production on “Things Don’t Stay Fixed,” Bartlett sought out fellow Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts alum and painter-turned-filmmaker David Lynch’s feedback. Bartlett says Lynch gave him two pieces of advice.
One: “Only work with people you like.” Bartlett followed suit. The second piece of advice?
“Keep your eye on the donut, not on the hole,” Lynch told him.
“Genius!” Bartlett says. “We kept working, kept moving, and things fell into place.”