Former bail bondsman, 87, finds his medium in tossed plastic 

Jerry Barrish organizes his art studio on the second floor at 35 Barlett St. like a laboratory. There’s a bin for red pieces of plastic, and one for blue; a container for combs, and a box for baubles. Then there’s the lab bench where the magic happens — the transformation of refuse into story. The former filmmaker and bail bondsman, age 87, crafted his first found-object piece in 1988 with plastic he sourced from the beach in front of his Pacifica home. That artwork, a Christmas tree, launched him into an unusual and successful art career. “I haven’t seen anyone doing what I’m doing,” Barrish said. “I have found a unique voice.” Crowding Barrish’s Mission studio is a fleet of figures: Customers at a cafe, cello players, women with jaunty hats. They’re joined by animals, from penguins to parrots, and inanimate objects, too (he has made a trove of menorahs). Anyone can visit his space, located on the second floor of the Nelson Duni Gallery on Bartlett Street, even if it feels like a hidden secret. It’s hard not to be moved by the emotion behind Barrish’s work — the tilt of a head, the bend of an arm, the sympathetic eyes of a partner — and the humanity it conveys. The choice of material, found plastic, is never at odds with such intimate expression. “I find it [plastic] as precious as metal or stone or marble or anything,” he said. “My work is just how it affects you, how it touches you.” He is not trying to make an environmental statement with his choice of material; he’s trying to tell a story. While his materials have changed over the decades — the plastic has become flimsier as it veers towards single-use — his approach remains the same. But, at the ripe age of 85, he landed New York representation for the first time. “I’ve been doing the same work for 40 years or more,” he said. “Then I get New York representation and suddenly people see me differently. I find that hysterical.” Barrish describes himself as a narrative artist; he crafts his plastic materials to tell a story. If Barrish is a storyteller, the best yarn of all may be the one about his life. The son of a professional boxer who ran with gangsters, Barrish became a recognized filmmaker and an acclaimed artist, all while clocking 52 years in the bail bond business. As a bondsman, he made it his specialty to free people in the interest of free speech. The observer Even though his parents didn’t take an interest in art, Barrish’s creativity was piqued when he was young — around 10 years old, on a school field trip to San Francisco’s de Young museum. “It was the most remarkable day, and I had never seen anything so amazing,” he said. “It changed my life.” His father, Bennie Barrish, exposed him to a different life-altering realm. As a boy, Barrish would listen to Bennie’s friends talk about their problems around the dinner table. “You can learn from your own mistakes,” he said, “or you can learn from other people’s mistakes.” He learned. Freshly returned from the army, he sat next to the person who bailed the mobster Mickey Cohen out of Alcatraz, and was encouraged to go into the business. Barrish set up shop in 1961, using the tagline “Don’t perish in jail, call Barrish for bail.” The neon sign from his former business hangs outside the second floor of the Nelson Duni Gallery, a building he purchased in 2018 and now operates with his niece, nephew and wife — the abstract painter Nancy Mona Russell — as an art gallery. “They said I wouldn’t last six months,” he said. “I lasted 52 years.” He posted bail for a who’s-who of the Bay Area’s radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s: Vietnam War protesters, the Black Panthers, the Berkeley Free Speech movement. It was perhaps this constant exposure to people in all walks of life that allowed Barrish to inhabit the reality of others. “Everything I know, I learned from observation,” he said. It’s a skill he refined early on at his parents’ dining room table, and one that served him in his next occupation — as a filmmaker. He used the GI Bill to study film at the San Francisco Art Institute, which resulted in three features and the support of German film director Wim Wenders (Barrish starred in Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” as the American director). His film career also resulted in the prestigious DAAD (Deustscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) residency in Berlin, which changed how Barrish thought of himself. “I never felt I could tell people I was an artist until I got that affirmation,” he said. Plastic Man In December 1988, Barrish stepped out onto the beach in front of his Pacifica home and began collecting plastic that had washed ashore. “All of a sudden, the material started to speak to me,” he said. A piece can take him anywhere from one day to 10 years to make, and his practice has evolved from letting the material speak to him to being able to go in with a preconceived concept. Whether the subject is a female protagonist going through therapy in his feature “Shuttlecock,” a gay couple in his movie “Recent Sorrows,” or a woman baring her post-mastectomy chest to her partner for the first time in the sculpture “Do You Still Love Me?” Barrish demonstrates an enormous capacity for empathy. The artist himself became the subject in the 2018 documentary “ Plastic Man ,” produced by Janis Plotkin, whom Barrish met through his involvement with the Jewish Film Festival. “The most important thing I learned [while making the film] was how his learning disability, his dyslexia, was his asset,” Plotkin said. The hallmarks of a dyslexic include outside-the-box thinking and empathy, Plotkin said, qualities that have served Barrish well in his creative life. Empathy is the connective tissue between his era as a feature filmmaker and his life as a creator of whimsical figures. Barrish identities his most important piece as “Waiting,” a 1996 sculpture of a woman waiting for the phone to ring. Everyone, Barrish said, is waiting for something: their lover to call, their children to phone, the doctor to pass on news. “This was the first major piece I made that even surprised me,” he said. Barrish, too, has been waiting. Even though he creates on an internal mandate and not for fame or acclaim, he is not immune to the desire for accolades and appreciation. The fact of New York representation has had a material effect on his work, making it more valuable and drawing in a younger audience than he’s ever had before, even as he ages. Plotkin, for her part, feels like her documentary could already use a refresh. “I finished the film 10 years ago, and his creative life since then has propelled into the stratosphere,” she said. That doesn’t mean that Barrish will be changing his routine, however. “If you’re an artist, part of your job is showing up,” he said. Like a monk, he will keep his dedicated practice: four days in the studio, one day collecting plastic, one day devoted to the 49ers. As far as he sees it, it will be that way for the rest of his life. He’d be happy dying in his studio, he said. “No one loves my work more than I do,” Barrish said.