Barnes’s paintings, populated as they are with elongated figures reminiscent of Parmigianino’s or Michelangelo’s later work, have been described as Neo-Mannerist. Though he enjoyed a successful career in the National Football League from 1959 to 1966, Barnes never stopped painting.Įd Wilson, sculpting professor at North Carolina Central University, taught Barnes to feel his movements while playing football and to then express that feeling in his work-a lesson Barnes never forgot. In 1956, Barnes enrolled at North Carolina Central University on a football scholarship and pursued a degree in art. Bullied because of his weight as a youth, Barnes sought acceptance through athletics and relied on art as a means of personal expression. Instead, he familiarized himself with artistic movements in the personal library of his mother’s prominent employer. He has been celebrated as “the most expressive painter of sports since George Bellows.” In his own words, Barnes’s sports paintings and tavern scenes offer “a pictorial background for an understanding into the aesthetics of black America.” Though he is not recognized as a participant within the Black Movement of the 1960s, as some of his contemporaries have been, Barnes nonetheless overcame numerous obstacles to realize his artistic ambitions.īorn in Durham, North Carolina, during the Jim Crow years, Barnes did not have access to art museums. Well known in both the professional sports and visual arts worlds, Ernest Eugene Barnes’s experience as an athlete was pivotal to his develo pment as a painter of rhythm and movement.
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