Prof. Paul Von Blum, Art History and African American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

"Ernie Barnes is one of the most accomplished contemporary figurative painters in America. His depictions of athletic events and scenes from daily life add enormous luster to the long tradition of American genre painting. His specific portrayals of African American themes have made him one of the most renowned and visible African American artists of the 20th century. His commitment, moreover, to such themes as the promotion of racial and ethnic harmony, the value of education and learning, and the dignity of ordinary people ensures his reputation as a leading humanist artist of our times."

John Stuart Evans, Director
Grand Central Art Galleries, New York

"I first saw Ernie Barnes' paintings in the autumn of 1969, when I joined the staff of the Grand Central Art Galleries. The explosive energy and hulking power of the football player images made an indelible impression upon me. Over the years I found these images etched as sharply in my memory as if I had viewed them only yesterday. His ability to endow the players with heroic dimensions . . . the clarity and vigor of his vision remains so vividly in my mind."

Benjamin Horowitz, Curator
Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles

"An artist's work is measured in phases. His cubist period, his flower period, his street scenes, his nudes. After more than three decades of painting, Ernie Barnes' work can be measured in an athletic period and a genre period. Art critics have the greatest difficulty in determining which is his greatest period.

"Ignoring his athletic prowess, difficult for a man who spent years playing professional football, he plunged into the world of art. Stretching back for his American roots, he found his artistic mentors, George Bellows and Thomas Hart Benton. Bellows to satisfy his need to explain macho mankind, and Benton to bare the joys and sorrows of just plain down home living.

"Barnes has continued to paint in the mannerist tradition, concentrating on his unforgettable themes of home town doings from the pool hall gang, the town meeting, the church meetings, playgrounds and to every facet of American life.

Joan D'Arcy, Arts Critic
On Barnes' "The Beauty of the Ghetto" exhibition

"Ernie Barnes has chosen to place his vigorous portraits and human landscapes of aspiration and graceful attitudes in the ghetto. His purpose is to illustrate persuasively and graphically that beauty and art are not confined to museums or aristocratic marble halls. Rather, he intends to show that art, life and vitality are bred of struggle and utilized potential, not geography. He is not saying that grace is solely found in ghettos, but that it is a product of community and historical memory. It is a by-product of the human condition....that joy, poignancy and exultation are as native to people as is darkness and disruption. Barnes has chosen to paint ghetto life to emphasize this truth.

"Barnes' paintings have been characterized by critic Frank Getlein as 'neo-Mannerism.' This is a technique which emanates from the 16th century school of art that employed intense colors, linear physiognomy, exaggerated sensuous movements, a joy of life and a faith in the future of humanity. All these are heightened by a dramatic chiaroscuro of light and shadow. Then, too, it has been suggested that Barnes is of the Genre school because of his depiction of people in dance and sport, as epitomized by the Flemish painter, Pieter Brueghel, and the American artist, George Bellows. But essentially, Barnes has his own spiritual territory and his own singular vision which does not skirt the truly disturbing issues of our time. He takes a stand for and serves the broad masses of people with paintings which reintroduces us to our neglected senses....

"Barnes' life experiences is comprised dually of the world of professional sport and a childhood spent in a Southern ghetto. These two powerful influences combine in a magnetic and viscerally moving style. Each painting is a complete world calling upon the mysterious interior of the psyche as metaphor. The viewer is caught up initially in the vivid energy of the painting. It is a kind of stylized élan...postures and attitudes barely restrained by the medium of paint . . . all strength and purpose and dignity within the confides of anatomy.

"There is a great humanity in Barnes' vision. The more obvious interpretation is that he is intent upon portraying the deep significance of mankind. But on a subtle level he is a purveyor of what Joseph Campbell calls 'bliss,' that rapturous state of being attainable by those who commit their intelligence and their imagination to an ideal.

Frank Getlein
Author and renowned art critic

"All these motions, all these bodies, all these colors and shapes, become, for a moment, ourselves. Art cannot give us more."

Adela Rogers St. Johns
Celebrated author and Medal of Freedom winner

"You need not be a connoisseur of art to enjoy Ernie's paintings, because he works in an idiom which speaks to every American layman. It's the American scene, America of sports, skid row America, American people."

Los Angeles Times, "Art Walk"

"Like Bernie Casey, Ernie Barnes is a noted black athlete who paints. Unlike Casey, Barnes combines his ethnic and athletic preoccupations with his art. The results are powerful canvases...which expressively speak of Barnes' pool room and locker room experiences and offer his very personal, often scathing views of city life."

Don Freeman, San Diego Union

"It is by no means an exaggeration to say that Ernie Barnes is the George Bellows of our time. The same intensity and drama and emotion that Bellows poured into his boxing masterpieces of the 1920s, Barnes has achieved with his startling insights into football and basketball, their ferocity and grace."

Dayle Kerry
Visual Arts Consultant

"Barnes didn't follow the vogue of abstract painting; he had the courage to go his own way. With the renaissance that figurative art is experiencing, the demand for his work has continued to increase. Some collectors just keep coming back to see what's new. They can't get enough. They come through the Internet and through word of mouth. There is no advertising, just the sheer visceral impact of his images. What they fall in love with is the emotional intelligence of his work and the power of his thinking. It's not just African Americans who hold Ernie Barnes to high esteem, because he does not work exclusively in a 'Black' idiom."

Paul Tagliabue
NFL Commissioner

"Ernie Barnes is an excellent example to our current players that there is life after football. We in the NFL family are pleased that Ernie is recognized as one of the leading artists of our day."

Peter V. Ueberroth
President, 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee

"Ernie has successfully captured the essence of the Olympic Games. As a body of work (the five sports posters) portray the ethnic diversity of Los Angeles, the power and emotion of sports competition, and the singleness of purpose and hope that go into the making of athletes the world over."

Jack Kemp
Former Congressman

"Ernie is a living manifestation of the American Dream. On a personal level, I am so pleased that Ernie's sketchbooks dating back 30 years have been unearthed. They are a blueprint of how perseverance, moral stamina, tenacity and courage can transform a hard-working, fiercely-competitive, mud-stained, old left guard into an accomplished, successful and revered artist. It happens. It happened to my teammate Ernie Barnes."

William A. Fagaly
New Orleans Museum of Art

"It is not every day we find a former football player, an NFL star no less, who not only paints pictures but renders them with great power and originality. But then, Ernie Barnes is not your everyday athlete or artist. Those twin passions in his life have been inexorably intertwined for decades, dating back to his locker room sketches when he was a standout offensive lineman for the San Diego Chargers and Denver Broncos in the early 1960s. Since his retirement from football, his career as an artist has grown luminously. Ernie Barnes has brought honor and distinction to his dual achievements in athletics and art.

"Barnes particularly excels in his depiction of what he knows best from personal experience in professional football: the swirling mass of muscled bodies as helmeted warriors clash violently on the playing field. He presents a first-hand perspective on the strain and pain of a sometimes brutal contact sport, and on the exhilaration of winning as well as the agony of defeat. He knows and celebrates the human body: its strength, its capabilities, its beauty, its potential. The figures are attenuated and with exaggerated gestures – arms flaying, limbs stretching, hands reaching and clawing. This is all eloquently demonstrated in Fourth and One which fills the picture plane with lunging, grabbing, pushing, hitting as the desperate offense tries to force its way to a first down against a defense equally determined to stop the forward drive in its tracks. We immediately sense the raw pain of this physical and emotional collision. The clash and crunch of the protective pads and the players’ uncomfortable grunts are achingly palpable. In the same vein The Last Hurrah portrays the anguished collapse of the hulking body of a defeated player, taking up the entire picture frame, and poignantly conveying the breakdown of both body and spirit from a bad day on the football field.

"Not all of Barnes’ renderings of sporting events present this macho image of fiercely dueling male athletes. He can see another kind of allure in the interactions of competitors in high-speed motion. Far from the violence of the football field is the grace and elegance portrayed in Above the Rim. Here a quartet of fit young men, all in flying motion above the ground, scramble and stretch for a basketball soaring out of reach above their heads. The bodies of these shirtless youths in jeans, while not touching one another, seem to be engaged in a synchronized dance in mid-air. Their acrobatic rhythms and curving gestures take on the agility and beauty of a ballet performance. Likewise in Habitat six muscled laborers at work strain their bodies in unison resembling a carefully choreographed motion of ease.

"Those youths depicted in Above the Rim are not the handsomely paid professional athletes Barnes often portrays so well. Rather they are underprivileged amateurs participating in a pickup backlot game on a make-do court with a bottomless wood-slat basket substituting for the conventional iron-rimmed net. No uniforms here; as a matter of fact, one player does not even have shoes. While Barnes pays tribute to the professional world of sports on one hand, here he celebrates the time-honored American sandlot sports scene. He has experienced both and knows one can lead to the other through serious application and dedication. Barnes is a humanist who, through his art, attempts to gently preach – much as a minister would to his congregation – a better life and how to achieve it.

"In Growth through Limits, he presents a blooming thistle plant growing through the seams of concrete pavement, suggesting a metaphor for the triumph of determination, hope and perseverance over seemingly insurmountable adversity. Not only is this flower prospering in an alien environment, but it is creating new cracks in a supposedly impenetrable surface. What a wonderful message for the three youths who have gathered around to witness this unlikely event! This is an example – along with the more recent painting, An Inner Strength, with a similar image and message – of how Barnes teaches life’s lessons through art.

"Ernie Barnes is not merely a one-motif artist who repeats subjects and formats. His works are presented in a variety of compositional modes and themes: the solitary individual (A Moral Imperative; Drum Major; Somewhere Else) or small groups of figures (Sam & Sidney; Screen Door; Shakedown) or horizontal panoramic views portraying multiple figures in a unified activity (Dance Class; All Sales Final; Habitat). While the majority of Barnes’ work has an unmistakable masculine tenor there is another smaller, equally compelling body of work which is more delicate and feminine in nature and subject. Back in the Day, Parting Ways, The View and The Runway focus on activities of interest particularly to women. One effective device which he employs often is the placement of figures in a circular motion (Each One, Teach One; The Competitive Spirit) which keeps the viewer’s eye in constant motion as well.

"As both artist and humanist, Barnes has drawn inspiration from the masters of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque period whose works in the churches and cathedrals taught the lessons from the Bible to the assembled. For example, his Conversion Attempt can be interpreted as a modern adaptation of Caravaggio’s Conversion of Saint Paul and the late 16th/early 17th century Spanish artist El Greco’s monumental Laocoon with the central figure recumbent on the ground, legs raised and feet prominently invading the viewer’s space. In The Competitive Spirit Barnes harks back to the Renaissance motif of The Deposition of Christ, but here replacing the draped nude and martyred Christ with the modern male athlete in his abbreviated athletic wear, slumped from total exhaustion and surrounded and supported by his manager, coach, admirers and the press. This composition also strongly echoes El Greco’s 1577 The Holy Trinity, and Barnes’ elongated figures relate to the long, sinuous figures of El Greco and the Italian Mannerists.

"The 2004 painting, A Life Restored, commissioned by singer Kanye West, is strongly reminiscent of Italian Baroque ceiling extravaganzas with a cast of a thousand characters swirling in the heavens. While these church paintings depict the resurrection and ascension of Christ into heaven, A Life Restored is full of personal references and symbolism, commemorating the hip-hop artist’s near-death experience in 2002 and celebrating his own survival.

"Ernie Barnes’s work also honors American painters of the 1930s and 40s, clearly reflecting the social realism of his mentor, Charles White, who portrayed the African American experience. Many of Barnes’ works recall Archibald Motley’s depiction of the African American culture of that time. Other artists’ paintings with which Barnes has a definite affinity are the portrayals of the American scene by Reginald Marsh, Thomas Hart Benton, George Bellows and Paul Cadmus. In short, Barnes is a serious student of art history and, while paying homage to his craft’s illustrious past, he convincingly makes his distinctive mark with his own subjects, style and message.

"Many of Barnes’ pictures are testaments of inspiration much like paintings of religion, particularly Christianity. In his Icons of Humanity, a robed woman reads from a book with large grisaille figures looming over her in the background: Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Florence Nightingale -- iconic revolutionaries who, despite overwhelming odds, changed the modern day history of the world through their deep convictions, heroic actions and personal sacrifice for the benefit of their fellow man.

"Ernie Barnes is his own Renaissance man. With his art he has been able to inspire and teach. His lifelong achievements as athlete, artist and humanist have made him a role model in his community -- a perfect example of practicing the principles he espouses: hard work and dedication, belief in one’s self, giving back and sharing. His narrative art is full of life, joy and optimism. The energy of his paintings is infectious, and we cannot escape the uplifting didactic messages he so eloquently offers. In this exhibition, as in all his works, he presents a highly singular personal vision of the physical and spiritual battles we all wage on the playing fields and on life’s stage, and the human race is all the richer for it."