Artist's Autobiography

Hi. My name is Joshua Lawrence Barkey. I'm nicer than Dali, less promiscuous than Picasso, and far worse at painting (so far) than Degas, who is both the cat's meow and its pajamas. I'll be your artist for the day.

Me? Well, I'm glad you asked. I popped out in 1979 in Lancaster, South Carolina, which at the time did not have a Walmart. From this cornbread beginning I went on to do extensive living in a number of very different, very interesting places. This is not surprising, since every place is very different and interesting if your eyes aren't shut and your tongue isn't wagging.

When I was still naught but a wee lad my folks trundled me off to Yarinacocha in Peru, South America, which was described in internationally renowned novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Storyteller" as follows: "Yarinacocha at dusk, when the red mouth of the sun begins to sink behind the treetops and the greenish lake glows beneath the indigo sky where the first stars are beginning to twinkle, is one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen." I concur.

I could have learned to draw artistically from the rich history and culture of Peru, but instead I figured out that if I sketched realistic pictures of alluring people, my friends would think I was cool. That was about it. Still, my experience as a "Third Culture Kid" in a "Third World Country" marked me indelibly with a concern for the poor and the ability to move with facility between a number of cultures and countries without feeling myself to ever truly be a part of any of them. This is both a curse and a blessing. Perpetual alienation isn't much fun, but it often allows me to see the forest while true locals are busy ogling individual trees.

From Peru I moved to British Columbia, Canada, where I spent four school years at TWU getting edjumicated. To fund this pedagogical madness I planted itty bitty trees - hundreds of thousands of them - in Northern BC and Alberta. Tree planting is kind of like hell - only it snows sometimes. While it beat the living excrement out of me and gave me pretty much all the worst days of my life, treeplanting also gave me a number of invaluable and super secret skills, skills which I will never reveal to you. Ever. Go planting yourself.

After graduating university, I'd planned to go to Nicaragua to break up some poverty cycles, but the board members who were supposed to be raising funds for the project were not only rich, they were also lazy. This left me residing in a garage and working as a teacher's assistant for the third grade in Waxhaw, North Carolina. There I met Anya, who right off the bat started convincing me of stuff. First - to help her shovel ordure of horse and, later, to marry her.


After two years in North Carolina, Anya decided to attend TWU. I needed a way to pay for this, so once again I packed off to Canada. Over the next five summers I hired, trained, and managed over seventy exceptional people through bugs, hail, blisters, snow, heat stroke, pain, blood, sweat and a whole lot of tears. I learned a lot about myself and the near-infinite capabilities of people who are willing to believe in their own ability to choose.


Every once in a while, when I got too hungry, I did other stuff. I worked a week for a New York billionaire art dealer, fixed fences, constructed some constructions, installed gas fireplaces, substitute teachered, and did some work as an "atmospheric background performer" in movies and television.

That, then, is my life in as small a nutshell as I can fit it. If you want to know more, browse this site. I won't stop you.