The Verve: Creating art for 60 years

Barry Blackerby, the son of a military man, spent his youth traveling around the U.S. and overseas.

His hobby was capturing his surroundings with a pencil. He created his first oil painting – a portrait of Eisenhower – at the age of 12. With the help of Walter Foster’s drawing books, Blackerby’s visual diary grew.

In 1962, Blackerby joined the Marine Corps. In 1964, he was sent to Washington, D.C., to train and then to Seoul, South Korea, where he provided security at the embassy for two years. All the while, he drew and painted. He met his wife, moved to California and then joined the Air Force. For the next 25 years, he traveled, visiting galleries and museums along the way. While stationed in England, he attended art school in Oxford, receiving a degree in painting and art history. He did many commissions and sold a lot of work out of tea shops.

In 1987, Blackerby was stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base. He and his family settled in the Spokane area and he retired from the military in 1992, received a bachelor’s in studio art from Eastern Washington University, and then worked as a service officer with the American Legion, retiring in 2012.

Now, Blackerby is free to paint every day.

“I like to tell stories,” he said, “not necessarily narrative, but implied.”

Blackerby has a lot of stories to tell and he shares them in many media and styles.

“My interests run the gamut,” he said. “If it’s a challenge, I do it. It’s a waste of time to limit yourself.”

From traditional portraits, studies of wildlife, and still-lifes to abstracts and even the surreal, Blackerby’s work represents his relationship with God and all of his creation; simple yet complex moments of beauty and peace which he finds even in the midst of chaos.

He paints in a spare bedroom in his North Side home that is filled with artwork; snippets of a lifetime that was almost cut short many times. In 1981, a bomb went off in a park in England where Blackerby and his family had been sitting a week before. In 1994, a gunman killed a psychiatrist and psychologist that Blackerby regularly visited at Fairchild and, in 2005, he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer but serendipity had him receiving a transplant quickly. “It’s kind of weird,” he said. “I guess I’m here for a reason.”

For a few years, he was plagued with panic attacks, and he still gets them from time to time, but his faith and his art keeps him comforted while perhaps comforting others. He has gifted pet portraits to neighbors, created art for other servicemen, and restored vintage pieces. One large painting, a mix of surreal and abstract, hung behind his desk at the VA and visitors would simply stare. “People really connected with it. It seemed to comfort them,” Blackerby said.