                             THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Thursday, September 19, 1996          TAG: 9609190042
SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER 
                                            LENGTH:  141 lines

POPULAR, FOLKSY ARTIST SET FOR OPENING OF LOCAL SHOW

THE 1985 VIDEO shows Barclay Sheaks mixing paints by an easel. Jazzy music plays in the background as the widely known Newport News artist offers his public television audience a hearty hello.

``Welcome to my studio,'' he exults. ``This is my world. And you can use acrylics to interpret your world.''

C'mon, he lures. ``Let's get started right now. Because painting is a joyful experience, and we don't want to miss a minute of it.''

It's the kind of enthusiasm that just doesn't die.

Flash forward to this week. Sheaks - who recently published his seventh book, and who has a show of his work opening Friday at a Norfolk gallery - is getting set for another Advanced Painting class at Virginia Wesleyan College, where he has been a full-time art professor since 1970.

Another VWC art instructor, Ken Bowen, is slouched in Sheaks' office, observing the comings and goings. Bowen first met Sheaks in the mid-1950s, when he was his student at Warwick High School in Newport News.

``He influenced my decision to be in art,'' said Bowen, an artist and art teacher since then. ``He was the first man I ever met who was happy in his work.''

Moments later, in the studio next door, Sheaks is engaged in a painting pep talk with his class, consisting of a dozen or so painters of all ages. They stare at him raptly.

``I'm not giving you any restrictions on what you can do,'' he says, ending his assignment. ``But it has to be heartfelt.''

Then he roams a room full of artists at their easels, a bee in the garden. A bee that rarely stings.

``He's always encouraging,'' said Virginia Beach thespian Shirley Hurd, one of his non-college age students. ``He'll say, `Shirley, you're getting better.' ''

Nobody thinks I work, because I always look so happy,'' said Sheaks - half serious, then laughing. ``But I work hard.''

He's mixed a lot of elbow grease in with his thick dollops of thalo blue and burnt umber acrylic paint. Not to mention the four decades he's spent in the classroom.

All that teaching, plus his art world kudos - including shows at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. - were good preparation for his television series and his books.

Public television producers chose him to host a 1985 how-to-paint-with-acrylics television series for many reasons - his versatility and expertise as a painter, his charismatic personality and his status as a pioneer in the use of acrylic paint.

Sheaks, who is 67, embraced the new painting medium from the 1960s. He has explored it further than most, finding ways to make it seem just like oil paint, egg tempera or watercolor.

His 13-part series, ``Acrylic Painting with Barclay Sheaks,'' brought Sheaks' infectious, folksy persona into households across the nation.

His books enhanced his national reputation, too. His first book was the 1972 ``Painting with Acrylics: From Start to Finish.'' About 25,000 sold over two decades, but it's now out of print. He's also published books of his poetry and artwork.

His third how-to was just released by Watson-Guptill, a significant publisher of how-to art books. Struck two years ago, the book deal constituted the artist's biggest publishing coup.

The first printing produced 30,000 copies, which were distributed worldwide, he said. Some Australian in the Outback may now be re-creating Sheaks' trademark peninsula marsh scenes. A Parisian city dweller might be holed up in her garret, practicing to paint Assateague ponies just like Sheaks - using ``analogous colors'' and a wet-on-wet technique to soften the forms.

His exhibit opening Friday at The Art Works Gallery in downtown Norfolk includes 15 paintings reproduced in the book, plus another 30 dating from the last few years.

Sheaks made painting after painting to illustrate techniques for the book, with a photographer hovering nearby to shoot the step-by-step demonstrations found throughout the text.

``I spent a year on my knees on this little table. I'd paint a little and say, `OK, shoot this stage.' Then I'd paint a little more, `Shoot this stage.' ''

Earlier this week, gallery owner Beth Benson was feeling relieved that Sheaks' show already was hung. ``Fear drove me to it,'' she said, laughing.

Benson has staged two other shows of Sheaks' work, and generally keeps a few of his pieces on display. He's a popular artist, she said. ``The most expensive painting we ever sold was his. It was $10,000, and that's a lot of money for this area.''

Sheaks hasn't exhibited locally in four years, so ``there's been a lot of interest,'' she said. One piece, a late fall image of two men on horseback in the countryside priced at $2,200, was marked sold five days before the show opened.

Sheaks' popularity could also be gauged by the turnout for a recent gallery talk he gave at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center, where a show of his landscape paintings remains on view through Saturday. It was a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, yet several dozen of his fans showed up.

All of his canvases depicted the local natural environment. ``Has the landscape changed much since you started painting it?'' asked Lise Swensson, the center's director.

``It has.'' He pointed to a marsh scene, and began indicating invisible elements. ``I would leave out the telephone pole that's here. And, pretty soon, they'll drain this. And they'll put a housing development in there.''

Nobody would ever peg Sheaks as a message painter. But he has a great reverence for nature.

``Yes, it's a great concern of mine. We don't need another shopping center.''

Later on, Sheaks and his wife, Edna, headed home to Hilton Village, where they've lived together since 1950. It's an old-timey neighborhood, straight out of Norman Rockwell. Their enormous long-haired cat, Buffalo, greets them in the driveway.

Inside his studio, where he's made paintings for so many decades, Sheaks stared with curiosity at his latest creation.

On his easel was a large painting of a girl seated on a high dune overlooking the waters at Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore. She is reading a book. There are no tufts of sea grasses in the foreground, no virtuosic renderings of the flotsam and jetsam that can wash ashore.

It was a throwback to his Watchers, the series begun in the 1960s that first brought him national attention. It's been at least 10 years since he's painted a Watcher.

``I've always had a predilection for lone figures. I don't know why that is. But I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. By myself, but not lonely.''

Sheaks acknowledges that he is likely among the region's most successful artists, on various levels. ``For me, success is crystalizing your artwork, bringing it into fruition, going whichever path the art leads you.

``I don't know where I'm going now,'' he said, suddenly. ``I certainly didn't think I'd be doing that.''

And he can't explain it. It's a mystery, like Iris Dement says.

Most people see only the gregarious side of Sheaks. ``But there is this other side to me. There has to be. Otherwise, I wouldn't be painting.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Bill Tiernan\The Virginian-Pilot

Artist/professor/author Barclay Sheaks at his studio in his Newport

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