JOHN GARVIN

John Garvin is the Co-studio Director at Bend Studio, writing, designing, and art directing video games. A long time Barks collector and scholar, he met Carl and Garé in the 1980s and learned new painting techniques from them. He has now been painting in the Barks manner for over 30 years. You can see more of his work HERE.

Also, see Garvin's article on Garé Barks HERE.

In 1976, when I was 16 years old, I had my first exposure to the paintings of Carl Barks. My family was in San Francisco on vacation and I wandered into a downtown comic shop, where I found an odd magazine which had a reproduction of an oil painting on its cover: Donald Duck and a pirate’s treasure chest. I now realize that it was an issue of Graphic Gallery, a catalogue of original art that Russ Cochran put out in the 70s and 80s. At the time, I had no idea who Carl Barks was, or why he was painting Donald Duck this way. All I knew was that I had seen a painting unlike any I had ever seen before. It was not quite like the simple but realistic painted comic covers of the Dell and Gold Key comics I collected, like "Turok" or "Space Family Robinson." Nor was it quite like the painted Mad Magazine covers I knew so well. I put the odd magazine back on the rack and went to digging more Turok comics out of the quarter bin, but I never forgot that golden image of Donald Duck, on a sunlit beach, exulting in buried pirate treasure.

A year later, my life changed: The new Comic Book Price guide came out, the one devoted to Carl Barks. I remember pouring over the cover, the photos of Carl at his easel, and the paintings. The reproductions were small and sometimes fuzzy. But they were real. Impossible panels of light and color and imagination. There was greedy Scrooge, back-lit by the golden light of an ancient cliff city as he revels in armfuls of gold, jade and silver. There is Donald and the boys looking anxious as their canoe is lifted from the frigid arctic sea by an angry polar bear, surrounded by sloping sheets of glacial ice and the eerie northern lights. Scrooge again, and the boys, n the "Cave of Ali Baba" swimming in a treasure trove of fabulous loot, all but one oblivious to the looming shadow of danger approaching down the tunnel. Here were paintings of adventure, alive with character and story and place, all rendered with a unique, cartoon-like reality. Not the realism of a Norman Rockwell, to be sure, but real none-the-less. They had an almost magical appeal.

From that day I knew that I would be an Artist. I had always been an "artist," but at seventeen I had not done much in the way of actual, hard work. Starting that year, I began copying Barks paintings. I bought oil paints, some cheap brushes, and canvas board, and opened my Price Guide and measured the small reproductions into little squares so I could copy the image onto my canvas. (I still have that beat-up hardback, drawn lines and all) I painted the Sailboat painting twice, and I painted the Sheriff painting and the "Seven Cities of Cibola" and the small painting of Scrooge tipping his hat. They were terrible things, those early copies of Barks paintings. All thin and washed out, with poster like colors. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I knew nothing of color mixing, or glazing, or layering, or media, or anything else. I was a high-school dropout and didn’t know much about anything. But when you are seventeen years old you think you know everything, which is good. Because if I had know how much work it takes to get as good as a Carl Barks, I would have never started.

Fast forward to 1981. I had been painting, still badly, for five years and I was running out of Barks paintings to copy. I had tracked down every copy of Graphic Gallery I could find, and had painted copies of "Rug Riders Last Flight" and "Time Out for Therapy" and "Scrooge in the mine" and the "Hard Hat" moneybin, and "McDuck of Duckburg." But 1981 was a benchmark year for the publishing of Barks material. Michael Barrier’s book came out (with some small black and white reproductions of Barks paintings); Celestial Arts published Uncle Scrooge McDuck His Life and Times (with a new, and admittedly not very good, Barks Disney painting); and Another Rainbow, the Gutenberg Press of Barks fandom, published The Fine Art of Donald Duck.

Every page of that book was a revelation. Flipping through the pages from beginning to end is to watch a master painter evolve. The early paintings, as Barrier points out, are not masterpieces, to be sure. Detail work is unrefined, the ducks themselves seem a little rough, and the compositions are taken from comic book covers. But with few exceptions, the color work is extraordinary, and after only a few paintings, when Barks has moved to masonite as his surface of choice, the paintings begin to glitter. By the time you get to Barks later work, paintings like "She was Spangled and Flashy," and "Nobody’s Spending Fool" and "Hands off my Playthings" you are looking at the work of a master. One afternoon when I was at the Barks home in Grants Pass (more on this later) Carl happened to have the "Playthings" panel on hand because he had been asked to retouch parts of the painting’s edges (AR had decided to use it for a Sharper Image lithograph.) I held this panel in my hands and scrutinized every inch of it. Even then I could not believe what I was seeing. The sparkles of the jewels, the luster of the gold, the composition, the coloring, the expressions on the figures, it all seemed too incredible to be real, too impossible that this image was confined in such a slim piece of pressed board. You expected Scrooge to leap out at you and pummel you with his cane.

After living inside that book for a week, I knew I had to meet this mythical artist. I wrote to Another Rainbow and asked for Barks’s address. I had done a painting, my magnum opus: Carl himself, sitting in the money bin, painting Scrooge’s portrait. As my way of making contact with Carl, I wanted to send it to him. I got his address, mailed it off, and waited. A couple of weeks later, in December of 1982, I got a nice letter from him:

"Dear John, Many thanks for your amazing painting of "The Good Artist." It is not often that people put that much good work into paintings that are only intended for gifts. I’m sure that you now have an idea of how much hard effort I put into my paintings of Uncle Scrooge and the ducks in the money bin. I painted 17 of those complicated mountains of coins and gimmicks.
I apologize for not writing sooner. Have been busy making sketches for a future money bin painting for the limited edition series being published by Another Rainbow Pub. Co.
Have to spend the next few days being interviewed for promotion ballyhoo. No fun.
Sincerely, Carl Barks."

Enclosed with the letter was a small reproduction of his first litho "Sailing the Spanish Main," the first of the lithographs that Barks would do for Another Rainbow. A year later, Carl would move to Grants Pass, a mere twenty minutes north of where I lived, and my life would change again. For the next eight years, until I moved away to attend graduate school, I would work on original paintings, look at Barks’s final and preliminary oils, discuss his work, and get encouragement for my own. Even when I stepped over the line, in the late 80s, and tried to sell some of my original Disney works (much to Barks’s dismay), Barks never failed to be gracious and generous of his time. Being a painter myself, and reaching Barks on that level, gave me a perspective on his work that others could not share. Not a unique ability to appreciate, because many of Barks’s paintings have achieved universal appeal, but a unique perspective on their craft.

Barks had specific rules that he had to follow: the ducks had to "face" the camera, no major duck figure could be turned more than three-quarter view away from the camera; the painting’s idea had to be as self-explanatory as possible (hence the bizarre idea of shipping an entire comic book with some of the later lithographs, like the money dam, which were deemed inexplicable); and, Uncle Scrooge, seen by marketers as Barks’s most popular character, was to be shoehorned into the scene if at all possible (hence Scrooge’s intrusion into "Sailing the Spanish Main").

One can see in Barks’s last period (1992 until his death in 2000, the Carl Barks Studio years and beyond) that his age was finally beginning to show. His paintings became conceptually less inspired, technically rougher with less refined use of color, paintings like "Rich Finds at Inventory Time" or "Surprise Party at Memory Pond" seem dull and flat compared to oils Barks had done just ten years before. In his very late oils, like "I Wonder What My Fortune Cookie Says" the detail work is completely gone, as if he were having trouble keeping his brush steady, the coins reduced to so many brown outlines. I’m also hard pressed to find any of Barks’s brilliance in the many color pencil drawings he did in this same period, published in the Applewood Press book Barks Treasury (1997). Compared to the watercolors of Barks’s third period (1976-1981) these pencil sketches seem tired and labored, though the adventure panels are better than the "gag" panels. But does this mean that I wish Barks had not drawn them? Absolutely not.

Add to these criteria the additional one of "ambiguity of purpose" and you have some truly startling images from Barks’s non-Disney canon. "The Pied Piper," for instance, with its image of the piper luring an army of small children away from the town, is disturbing in the extreme. And there are dozens of images from this same period where Barks seems to be rebelling against the Disney image he is so closely identified with. We find him painting, with uncensored glee: anthropomorphic harem girls, sexually violent vikings, clawing gold diggers, drunken gunslingers, and bloody murderers. Images that have more in common with Barks’s early years at the risqué "Calgary Eye Opener" than with his Disney work. The sexual content in these images, the expressed attitudes towards money and women, the linking of sex and violence, the image of "female as prize," are all unsettling and intriguing. I challenge you to look at "The Mountain Man" with its image of the naked Indian woman caught in a mountaineer’s animal trap, and not be provoked in some way. I don’t know how to discuss these works yet, and don’t know where they fit in the history of popular narrative and visual discourse, but I know they belong in any intelligent discussion of Barks’s career.

On one of my visits Carl and Garé took my wife and I out to breakfast. Carl had just bought a brand new 4 wheel drive SUV and insisted on driving. We got in, buckled our seatbelts, and were chatting merrily away while Carl slowly backed out of his driveway into the street. As we headed up the steep incline to their favorite pancake house (Barks’s favorite meal was a good old-fashioned country breakfast) my wife and I were stunned when Carl suddenly floored the gas pedal and the SUV ripped up the road in a great burst of speed, throwing me back into my seat so hard that I literally burst out laughing. Here was this eighty-five year old guy, hot rodding. Garé gave Carl a stern look and smiled at us: "Oh he’s just showing off." Maybe Barks didn’t need more than his meager pension, but I’m glad the income from his paintings let him afford to buy and enjoy some toys. The look on his face, roaring up that street, was priceless. And he loved his new home in Grants Pass, with its room to showcase his work, and with its massive studio, which Barks was able to expand. Barks was thrilled to be able to afford things like his personal photocopy machine, an expensive toy in the 80s, which allowed him to Xerox his sketches and gesso the photocopied work directly onto the masonite for his preliminary paintings. I would not begrudge Barks one dime of the success that his paintings brought to him, success denied him all the years he slaved away with pen and ink.

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I brought up my visits with Barks to demonstrate that there are those who came to Barks through his paintings, not his comics. I went to his home to discuss painting with he and his wife Gare', not comic stories. I discovered Barks through the paintings in the 77 price guide. I decided to become an artist that year, when I was 17, because of those Barks paintings. I spent five years doing copies of Barks paintings, just for the joy of it. When Barks moved to Southern Oregon in the early 80s (my home at the time) he invited me to come show them to him. Here I was this geeky 20 year old kid with a bunch of ripoffs of Barks paintings, and they were thrilled, I think in retrospect, that someone took an interest in the work itself, and not in "Carl's name attached to some pretty pictures of Disney ducks." Those early paintings of mine were terrible, all washed out with no depth.

So he took me under his wing. They spent hours with me, talking about technique, and tools, and paints. I still have a sheet of paper, in Carls hand, showing me his recipe for mixing oil and turps and varnish, to get a slick oil suitable for the smooth masonite surface. Gare' showed me how to prepare, gesso, and sand the masonite surface (Carl learned most of the nuts and bolts of painting from his wife Gare', who was a professional landscape artist). Carl gave me his palette schemes for making gold, and feathers, and duck bills.

But mostly what Barks showed me was his incredible imagination and sense of humor. Yes, I have several Barks lithographs hanging in my home. Not ONE of them is of Disney ducks. My two favorites are Xerxes and Harem, and Caliph of Bagdad. I still smile everytime I look at these collections of exotic, half naked anthropomorphic duckbilled harem girls. The sheer audacity of the image! Here's a famous Disney artist painting nude disneyesque ducklings. And the playfullness of it. Xerxes, surrounded by beautiful women, ignores them and plays cats cradle with a handful of string. And the coloring! Subtle shades of the same primary colors used in the comic books, but such mastery of them. And the composition and drawing. Each frame filled to the brim with interesting detail, but not overpowering the central figure. And each painting getting its humor from a different source: Xerxes essentially a "gag" in which the humor derives from a juxtaposition of images (Xerxes, surrounded by naked girls, ignores them to play with his string); where as Caliph is essentially a "story panel" in which the magic carpet riding Caliph hovers above the thumbs-out hitchhiking naked girls, inviting us to wonder where he is going, or where he is returning from, and which of the girls is he taking with him. And what kind of a world view is it, anyway, that can have two closely related paintings take such diametrically opposed viewpoints of masculine power?

These are masterworks of art, not fanboy pictures. I really believe that Barks was onto something here, a new way of painting, a new way of creating images that mesh comic book sillyness with the rendered reality that a well painted oil can achieve. I have spent the last 25 years of my life studying and learning from the paintings of Carl Barks. Barks paintings are how I got my career started as art director. Barks paintings have driven me creatively for 25 years.

This contribution is an excerpt of entries on the web. © John Garvin