Barry Nemett

About the Book

    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.

About the Author

    Barry Nemett has exhibited his paintings in museums and galleries throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe. Since receiving a Fulbright/ITT International Travel Fellowship to Spain, he has lectured worldwide, curated numerous traveling exhibitions, and has been a recipient of resident artist grants in the U.S., Japan, Korea, Scotland, Italy, and France.
    Upon receiving his MFA degree from Yale University, Mr. Nemett began teaching at Maryland Institute College of Art, where he has been Chair of the Painting Department since 1992. He has published essays and poetry for numerous magazines and is the author of the college textbook, Images, Objects & Ideas: Viewing the Visual Arts (MacGraw-Hill Publishers). He recently published his first novel, Crooked Tracks (Barnhardt & Ashe Publishing Co.).