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Off the Wall with Artist Heidi Barack |
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Written by Justin Hopper
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Tuesday, 09 January 2007 |
Off the Wall with Artist Heidi Barack
For Seattle artist Heidi Barack, to get a call from a record store wasn’t particularly out of the ordinary. Barack has worked in the music business since the late 1980s, first as a clerk at retail chains, then working her way up to the distribution side for major labels. What was odd that Saturday afternoon last year was that the clerk calling her from Seattle’s famed Easy Street Records wasn’t asking about new releases, but about Barack’s paintings hanging on the shop’s wall: stark, woodcut-like paintings of iconic images of music stars such as Joey Ramone and Joe Strummer.
“She asked if I’d do other artists for a customer,” says Barack. “She said, ‘I’ll put him on,’ and a man picked up the phone—it was Eddie Vedder.”
The Pearl Jam singer not only bought the Strummer and Ramone paintings, but commissioned Barack to paint his late friend, guitarist Johnny Ramone. Soon afterwards, Barack was designing buttons for Pearl Jam’s most recent tour, and recently garnered more commissions, including one of Marky Ramone by the drummer’s wife.
Barack’s rock-star paintings—textural, three-color images, divided into series by their standout color (“Red,” “Blue”)—fall somewhere between album-cover photography and Andy Warhol’s silkscreen images. (She’s even painted Chairman Mao— sort of a painter’s “cover song.”) And like Warhol, it’s not necessarily the most vital or popular cultural figures she chooses as subjects, but those most important to her, whether that’s a household name like John Lennon or The Fall singer Mark E. Smith.
“It’s my little tribute to them,” says Barack. “My whole life revolves around music. I haven’t ever painted anybody that I don’t [personally] like; I paint the things that touch me. All the ones I’ve done so Miles Davis far, I’ve been influenced by their music, even if it just gets me through a bad day.” www.galaxygloo.com
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 17 January 2007 )
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