FROM and ABOUT JOEL BARR 

I grew up in Orlando before Disney arrived and, in fact, before the majors first moved teams out west.  The Brooklyn Dodgers were on the radio all season and my public schools would play the World Series games over the intercom.  I knew most of the rosters of all the sixteen teams of that era.  Baseball entered my psyche early as did the other stories of a small town.

I went to public school in Orlando then off to Duke University for college.  That was followed by a brief stint as an English and journalism teacher at the junior high school I had attended a few years before.  I began writing fiction about that time.  A trip back to grad school at the University of North Carolina resulted in a master’s in city planning. 

I spent the next twenty years in various jobs, always writing poetry and fiction on the side.  Finally, I began to write full-time and produced a string of novels.  One, Chapters and Verse, was published and remains in print.  I also wrote for small literary magazines including the two baseball literary publications:  Elysian Fields Quarterly and FAN:  A Baseball Magazine.  At some point, I began to hang out with artists and was, luckily and miraculously, encouraged to paint.

I’ve taken workshops and seminars but am mostly a self-taught artist.  Since I paint so much and celebrate every painting day, I’ve been a perfect candidate for trial and error learning as far as technique is concerned.  I’ve been lucky enough to have been in a number of juried exhibitions and to have gallery representation in several southern states.  Outdoor shows allow me to offer a lot of my work at once and to talk with others who find themselves on their own journeys to discovery.  I’ve done commissions of various sorts, numerous pieces for benefits, and cover art for twenty or more books.  My work is in collections all over the U.S. and in other countries as well.

I live in Atlanta now with my wife, Grace (a free-lance writer), and Jack the eternal puppy.  My son is a jewelry maker and my daughter, a meeting planner.  My son-in-law teaches business while coaching high school baseball  and my grandson learns and teaches.

SURREALBASEBALLART.COM was developed so I could share a special set of my paintings.  Like my other works, these are mostly narrative.  They happily intersperse the real with the surreal and represent my own view of aspects of life as seen in the game.

Baseball lends itself to the surreal.  It is a game that defies time in that there are conceivably an infinite number of innings in one game.  When you watch it, time drops away as it does when you paint.  There are so many places for your mind to wander at the ballpark:  What is the third base coach thinking?  Is the catcher worried about his son’s chemistry test?  Is the groundskeeper in night school?  The slow pace of the game somehow complements the intense action that might take place in a second or two.

There is also this.  If you’ve played the game or watched it closely, you know that any player, at any time, might do something he or she cannot do.  In an instant, an infielder might fly, parallel to the ground, to catch a low liner.  A batter might make contact in such a way that the bat shatters in his hands.  A knuckle ball might drop a foot or more.

There is a wonderful art to baseball and there is also this eternal surreal element.  This combination draws me to do these paintings.