Golfscapes

For 28 years, Erwin S. Barrie has been not only director of Manhattan's big Grand Central Art Galleries but an amateur painter as well. Last week, for the first time, he got around to hanging some of his own paintings on the walls. Onetime Amateur Golf Champion Willie Turnesa turned up at the opening; so did dozens of other tweedy sportsmen who circled the room crowing, "I remember this one!" and "I made that one in three." Amateur Barrie, who called his canvases Famous Golf Holes I Have Played, couldn't have been more pleased at the down-to-earth comments.

A trim, tanned suburbanite of 60, Barrie divides his holidays between golf and art. He shoots in the low 80s, paints less well. His innumerable strokes of smudgy pigment often land him in the rough. But, in welcome contrast to most contemporary art, his paintings are unpretentious and done with obvious enjoyment.

What's more, the pedestrian naturalism of Barrie's golfscapes is relieved, now & then, by a whiff of romantic feeling. "I have allowed myself the privilege," he says in the catalogue foreword, "of interpreting each hole in the time of day, or season of the year, that seemed most appropriate. For instance the 5th hole at [Clementon, NJ.'s] Pine Valley was painted on a grey morning, after an all-night rain. Pine Valley is a rugged course, as all golfers know, and this is reached with a 218-yd. shot uphill. The green . . . is as formidable as a medieval castle.

"The little 11th hole at [Tarrytown, N.Y.'s] Sleepy Hollow, a one-shotter of 142 yds., is, on the other hand, attractive and gay. It is comparatively easy. The trees are soft and inviting, the reflections in the water are lyric and I have tried to give just that impression in my colorful and atmospheric interpretation of it."

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