Ernie Barnes (American, 1938-2009) Easy Shot, 1971 Oil on canvas 24 x 48 inches (61.0 x 121.9 cm)...

Description

Ernie Barnes (American, 1938-2009)
Easy Shot, 1971
Oil on canvas
24 x 48 inches (61.0 x 121.9 cm)
Signed lower right: Ernie Barnes

Property from the Estate of Saul and Shirley Turteltaub, Beverly Hills, California

PROVENANCE:
The artist;
Commissioned by the present owner from the above, 1971.

Ernie Barnes's Easy Shot is a masterful meditation on movement, community, and the visual rhythm of everyday life. Set within the soft haze of a 1970s Southern pool hall, the painting transforms an ordinary pastime into a tableau of grace and psychological tension. Enlivened with Barnes's signature neo-mannerist style—distinguished by elongated limbs and emotionally charged figuration—the work hums with energy and atmosphere. It is a portrait not merely of a game in progress, but of human connection, ritual, and quiet pride, rendered with the dignity and dynamism that define Barnes's visions of American life.

Born in 1938 in Durham, North Carolina, at the height of the Jim Crow era, Barnes's formative years unfolded in "The Bottom," an economically marginalized neighborhood shaped by segregation. His father, Ernest Barnes Sr., worked as a shipping clerk for Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, while his mother, Fannie Geer, served as head housekeeper for a local attorney. It was through her employer's art books and catalogs that Barnes encountered the works of Old Masters whose muscular compositions and spiritual intensity left a lifelong imprint. Yet, his own subjects would not be mythological or aristocratic; they would be the men and women of his own community, observed through a lens of grace, strength, and humanity.

Before fully devoting himself to painting, Barnes played professional football in the National Football League, a background that proved formative to his artistic vision. "Being an athlete helped me to formulate an analysis of movement," he once said. "Movement is what I wanted to capture on canvas more than anything else; I can't stand a static canvas" (This Is My Art, YouTube, July 28, 2011). The present work's commissioner, Saul Turteltaub, an acclaimed television producer and comedy writer whose name appears in the composition on a poster affixed to the far wall, likely met Barnes through his Hollywood connections. These ties were made most evident when the artist's iconic painting The Sugar Shack appeared in the end credits of the groundbreaking sitcom Good Times in 1976.

At the center of Easy Shot, two pool tables stretch into the room's depths, aligned side-by-side like twin stages of a performance. The players lean, reach, and extend in calculated balance, their bodies taut with concentration, capturing that breath-held instant before cue meets ball. Above them, hanging lamps diffuse a hazy light that saturates the tables' green felt surface and traces the leftmost onlooker with an ethereal glow. A wicker rocking chair positioned at the composition's center, sits empty and ignored—an emblem of stillness amid motion. The setting's smoke-stained walls, low ceiling, and tattered posters situate the scene firmly within the lived environment of working-class Black America, evoking a communal rhythm that feels at once deeply particular and universally human.

Within its modest setting, Barnes captures something far greater than a pastime: the delicate balance between competition and companionship, individuality and community, labor and leisure. The subjects in Easy Shot are not simply players of a game; they are practitioners of a meditative ritual. Each cue stroke becomes an assertion of focus and control, while the soft, diffused light acquires a near-sacramental quality, transfiguring the quotidian into the spiritual. The pool hall becomes a stage for grace and poise, a place where physical gesture carries emotional and cultural weight.

Easy Shot is included in the forthcoming Ernie Barnes catalogue raisonné. We thank Luz Rodriguez for her assistance cataloguing this work.


Estimate: $150,000 - $250,000.

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