I walked one day in the Garden of Wasted Things,
And there I found
The bitter ghosts of all that had been spent unwisely,
Or lost through brutal circumstance.
I found the childhood
That some labourer's child had never known;
I found the youth that some young man had squandered;
There I found some poet's genius that had gone unrecognised.
I saw the ghosts of idle words and small talk,
That men had used to waste away the hours.
I saw the hopes that had been smothered,
And all the dreams that never had come true,
And laughter that had died for lack of bread.
I met with all the lives that had been misdirected,
And spoke with dreary shades
Of loves that might have been,
And songs that never had been sung.
I met with all these ghosts,
And many more;
And each of them
Sat silently in the shadows,
Brooding over quirks of mad Creation,
And puppets' dreams.

‘The Magpie’ by Robert S Warshow 1933


Bohuslav Barlow’s works have their roots, to a large extent, in a history of post war displacement and childhood alienation that made isolation a condition of his life and which has fed into his unique art.

Born as Bohuslav Klos in a small town in Upper Moravia, Czechoslovakia, in 1947, he never knew his father. Having fled Czechoslovakia, still a baby, with his mother, a Sudeten German; they arrived in Furstenfeldbruck near Munich with scarce belongings. Shortly after this his mother left Bohuslav with his grandparents and moved to England to find work. Following intermittent visits, at eight years old he was summoned to join his mother and stepfather, an American Guyanan from whom he took the surname Barlow, to live at first in Blackpool.

The family were poverty-stricken and as they moved next to Blackburn and then to Oswaldtwistle, a small Pennine town, things did not improve. It was here that, with crayons and pencils as his only toys, the profoundly unhappy Bohuslav discovered his metier as an artist, giving him release from a comfortless childhood with “the drizzle of desperate circumstances”.

After school he was to spend a year at Manchester School of Art before going on to the Central School of Art in London, where as a representational painter he was somewhat out of place with the prevailing abstract expressionists and those moving into pop art. Resisting the urging of his tutors to adopt these trends, isolation again became a feature of his existence.

Whilst still living in London after he graduated, and following visits to North Africa, Turkey and India as well as Europe, Bohuslav went to Blackburn on his motorbike passing through Todmorden on the way. The bleak and wild scenery of the Pennines immediately appealed to him and perhaps for the first time in his life he felt at home. The isolation of the eerie Lancashire post industrial wasteland with railway viaducts, packhorse bridges and structures which litter a landscape once filled with busy lives, long since gone, struck a chord with Bohuslav. He has lived and worked in Todmorden for the past 35 years where he is known by his friends as Slavo.

These dark and somewhat brooding vistas form the back drop to much of his work, but not for Bohuslav the conventional Northern landscapes; the alarming angles of his compositions and the cast of characters and ‘props’ that are used to fantastical effect appear in backgrounds that conform to all the rules but are very different. As well as live models, beautiful nudes, clowns and children at play, there are life size puppets and toys as well as a medley of strange beings that inhabit these paintings in surreal, melodramatic scenes where one feels there is a sort of personal mythology being played out.

If the symbolism in many of Bohuslav’s paintings is meant to give us clues, then we are left to work it out for ourselves. His early life, torn from his roots into an alien existence where isolation meant he had to construct his own alternative world may help us, but it is hard to say. Because the artist himself says he does not know, ultimately these enigmatic, strangely beautiful paintings must speak for themselves.

Henry Beesley, June 2008