Illustrator Illuminates the History of Disaster
Former Laguna Beach artist Bryn Barnard’s skeleton is included in a Smithsonian exhibition that opened last week.
While Halloween goblins retreat into the shadows, another seasonal menace puts a real scare into health officials: the H1N1 virus. To put the swine flu pandemic into a historical perspective, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., last week opened “Outbreak: Plagues That Changed History,” composed of artwork by a Laguna Beachraised artist.
Author/illustrator Bryn Barnard artwork focuses on six diseases and the epidemics that impacted medical history: bubonic plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, yellow fever and influenza. One of the exhibit’s most powerful images is one seated little skeleton forlornly surveying what is left of the world.
Other paintings show people in period costume going about their daily business but wearing the facemasks the world has become accustomed to through several recent epidemics.
Barnard, a resident of Friday Harbor, Wash., maintains strong roots in Laguna Beach, where he grew up, met and married his wife and where his mother still lives. He studied art at Laguna Beach High School from Hal Akins and ran cross-country under Len Miller. He received a scholarship from the Festival of Arts, which bankrolled most of his undergraduate studies in studio art and Asian studies at UC Irvine and later UC Berkeley.
Although he has spent the last 20 years working as an illustrator in advertising, book publish- ing, editorial publications and gaming, he has also lent his hand to public art projects in Laguna and elsewhere along the West Coast.
In 1977, he painted the iconic mural of a whale on the seawall in front of the Hotel Laguna in collaboration with Mark and Kent Mathieu. In 1985, he designed one of the holiday palettes annually displayed on Coast Highway and exhibited his oil paintings at the Festival of Arts. He has also lectured at the Laguna College of Art and Design on Asian art, architecture and advertising.
His paintings for “Outbreak…” have been shown at the Smithsonian’s Global Health Odyssey Museum and at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. His extensive research into the history of pandemics formed the nucleus of a keynote address on disease and the emergence of public health care at the Caring for Colorado Foundation Public Health Summit.
Barnard has also designed and painted over 200 feet of murals for lobbies at the Janet Sinegal and Melinda Gates buildings at Children’s Hospital in Seattle. He is the author of three books: “Dangerous Planet,” “Outbreak” and his most current one, “The Genius of Islam: How Muslims Made the Modern World.” is to be published in 2011.
The National Museum of Health and Medicine is asking for commentary from viewers who have seen the exhibition on its website. E-mail to nmhminfo@ afip.osd.mil.
