[2] He studied there for five years (1936–1940), specializing in wood engraving under John Farleigh, while William Roberts and Bernard Meninsky helped with his tuition.
He was a founding member in 1946 alongside Henry Collins, Lett Haines, John Nash, and Cedric Morris, whom he succeeded as President in 1982 and which position Barrett held until 2000.
In 1948, the Hilton Gallery, Cambridge, gave Barrett his first solo show, which included engravings, drawings, and paintings on a Don Quixote theme.
.great emotional, as well as formal, power, of rich symbolic suggestiveness and, above all, of deep humanity.”[4]Barrett’s great-grandfather was a nonconformist radical and Chartist.
In the words of his biographer David Buckman: Barrett was one of the most distinctive artists working in Britain in the twentieth century … he is the opposite of the commercial painter of pretty pictures that fill a gap in the sitting room wall and convey their message in a glance Or as his friend Thomas Puttfarken wrote: ‘[Barrett was] fundamentally resistant to, and suspicious of, the “isms” of modern and post-modern art since the 1960s, Roderic pursued his own way.
[4]In the same friend and art historian’s view: when Barrett switched from engravings to oils, he retained the mastery and precision of drawing associated with the former.
In Barrett’s work, seemingly normal objects, such as chairs, tables, buckets and candles take on symbolic meanings, suggestions of myths, the subconscious, or of nightmares.