This elegant drawing, featuring one of Barton’s customized stamps at the top, illustrates his predilection for plant life. Although such works recall the spare botanical drawings of Henri Matisse (1869–1954), with whom he was certainly familiar, Barton developed an idiosyncratic repertoire of marks, such as those that denote the nodes of the central stem.
Rick Barton (1928–1992)
Barcelona, August 21, 1962
Pen and ink with graphite
Rick Barton papers (Collection 2374), UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles