Ernie Barnes is a former NFL lineman who retired at the height of his career to a life of unconditional devotion to art. Born and raised ion the segregated South, at a time when blacks were not admitted to art museums, comfort and reassurance abounded in the safe haven of a nurturing home, where his parents showered him with love and affection. His struggle to nurturing home, where his parents showered him with love and affection.

    His struggle to become an artist began at a very young age. The ghetto in which he lived could barely imagine black men as construction workers. Therefore the mere suggestion of aspiring to be an artist was not only ridiculous and unfathomable in this milieu, it appeared to be an impossibility. But the prominent attorney who employed his mother as a maid indulged the young aspiring artist by immersing him in studies of the old masters.

    Young Ernest's misunderstood ambitions made him a misfit and daily beatings from peers was his due until he reached junior high school. In a desperate attempt to fit in, this shy, fat and unathletic boy reinvented himself, graduating from high school with 26 football scholarships.

    Barnes received his academic training at North Carolina Central University in Durham while on a football scholarship. As an art major, he was trained in mastering the highest expression of man's visual creative powers, the human figure. In 1960, having acquired the necessary tutelage, Barnes' principal ambition was to immediately become an artist. His training in the art of the figure, however, made the trendy abstract paintings, which were coming into vogue confusing and repugnant to him.

    With his head filled with the romantic realism of Delacroix, Michelangelo and Caravaggio, he entered the arena of professional football where for five years, the mayhem became the caste of his mind and character.

    In 1966, following the critical evaluation of art experts who pronounced that he was the most expressive painter of the American scene since Bellows, Barnes retired from football at the request of his new patron, corporate executive and art collector, David "Sonny" Werblin, who paid Barnes his football salary over the period of one season to resign himself to refining his skills painting. In 1966, he placed Barnes with New York's prestigious Grand Central Art Galleries and sponsored his first solo exhibition there.

    For more than thirty years now, his paintings have delighted collectors, admirers and scholars alike. A virtuoso draftsman, painter and muralist, his list of discerning collectors is as impressive as it is long. This is perhaps the greatest tribute to the expressive and timeless quality of his work, which eloquently combines his ethnic and social preoccupations. The results are often powerful canvases in the vein of the American genre paintings of the thirties but with the mannerist elements of serpentine lines, paradox and an emphasis on an aesthetic play with form.

    What he offers as an artist is a blend of intelligence and humanism that people hunger for. He paints with a sensibility that is prone to literalness, rationality, and careful categorization, one that resonates through American life with a love for people. Not only has Barnes been publicly extolled for his interpretations of African American culture, he synthesizes the total American ethnic experience into an accessible and powerful whole. In a general diffused sense, he is an educator, a humanitarian, a guide who will take you by the hand and lead you into the privilege world of the gallery and museum.

    Throughout his career, Barnes never wavered from producing works that accentuate humanity in all its glory. In his hands, a paintbrush becomes a powerful tool in provoking, enlightening and inspiring a deeper understanding of the world we all share.