Notable for stark, postmodern black-and-proud oil portraits, "Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool" - his first career retrospective, on tour for the last two years - finally opened yesterday at his alma mater, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

And starting Nov. 6, Sande Webster Gallery hosts Hendricks' quietly dynamic Caribbean landscapes. In addition, on Nov. 12 "Walkin' With Walker: Narrative Photography of Barkley Hendricks" begins at the African American Museum, showing the 63-year-old North Philly native's observational edge with a camera.

At present, however, Hendricks - a longtime professor of art at Connecticut College in New London, where he has lived since 1972 - is more worried about healing than hometown plaudits.

"I had a run-in with a router, an unfortunate situation where I was cut to the bone," he says with a matter-of-fact chuckle.

Celebrating what made him famous - his life-sized portraits' mix of elegantly disposed black nationalism, realism, and pop art against solid matte backgrounds - might help him feel better. Certainly, the fact that the exhibition is called "Birth of the Cool" and has been deemed worthy of its Miles Davis-inspired title is a start. Hendricks is honored by the title and the praise because "listening to Miles and seeing Miles' style" was always crucial to the work.

"There's a whole aspect of being influenced by music of that time, that Miles was the epitome of, that's major in my painting," says Hendricks, who named paintings for compositions by Duke Ellington ("Sophisticated Lady," Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson ("Arriving Soon") and Marvin Gaye (1974's "What's Going On") and created latter-day works based on meeting and photographing Afro-pop legend Fela Kuti.

The cool jazz, smooth soul, and dress consciousness of his youth, from the '50s to the '70s, is richly prevalent in his most fast-forward figurative paintings; wry and sexy looks at such associates as 1972's Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris, heroes like 1969's Icon for My Man Superman (Superman never saved any black people - Bobby Seale), and himself vis-à-vis the double-entendre nude that is 1977's Brilliantly Endowed and the white-on-white Slick of the same year.

Unlike the cliches of urban existence that blaxploitation cinema used after its initial classics (Shaft, Superfly), Hendricks' work avoided stereotypes and treated African American women and men with dignity. All his figurative portraits were stately and self-informed rather than self-inflated.

It was easy to do this: If his subjects weren't already his friends, he spent time getting to know each one.

"These were enlightened folks . . . whose diction or use of the English language was colorful," says Hendricks of people with whom he shared political directions and life lessons. "If we didn't get a chance to talk, there were certain areas of style and elegance about them that I felt were inspirational. And there was about them an overriding influence that I saw when I was in Europe - a style of painting that was of a scale that helped me move toward the confrontational in terms of graphic scale that was readily available there."

In other words, his subjects were already larger than life. The secret of his success is that he didn't need to explode their personalities on canvas; his life-size work captured a what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach best and made all that he pursued graphically powerful. His flatness had the illusion of density. His limited-palette series, done in media such as magna and acrylic, popped.

There were nods to the likes of Egon Schiele (whom Hendricks dug), Alex Katz (not so much), and Andrew Wyeth. He certainly learned from other masters in other places - photography at Yale under Walker Evans, life lessons such as the Cresson European Traveling Scholarship and the J. Henry Scheidt Traveling Scholarship that changed his parochial outlook. Yet somehow the work he's made seems created in a vacuum of his own devising. Though there are identifiers, Hendricks' paintings are fully hatched and self-realized.

"Right you are," he laughs.

He learned cocky confidence and artistic expression in Philly, the son of a contractor father and a homemaker mother in North Philly's Temple University/Allegheny Avenue area. Hendricks was a good kid growing up, if not the most ardent student initially. But at Simon Gratz High School he developed a "decent enough portfolio" to get into the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1963. "I was an unpolished gem, and getting to the academy helped to polish," he says.

While in art school, he pursued his love of jazz with shows at local clubs like the Showboat where he caught such giants as Cannonball Adderley and Charles Lloyd. While learning the academy's language of art, he connected with a group of what he calls Amer-African ("Americans of African descent") artists - James Brantley, Moe Brooker, James Gatson, Richard Watson - forming bonds of friendship and aesthetic growth.

After he got the above-mentioned scholarships and the opportunity to study at Yale, his career took off in 1968 with large-scale, figurative signature paintings such as FTA's soldier, the next year's deliciously stately Lawdy Mama and Miss T, and the wide-brimmed, well-heeled stuff of Down Home Taste and Dixwell of 1971.

Hendricks has, in spurts, moved away from his flashy, realist figurative paintings. A diabetic, he travels to Jamaica often for his health and has painted plush landscapes there - works that give him more satisfaction than his deeply etched portraits.

"When I'm sitting in the warmth of the Caribbean, there's an immediate gratification there," he says. "Not only because of the sun. I can start a piece and finish it in four or five hours. I'm a better colorist because of my outdoor painting." Photography, too, offers immediacy in terms of artistic satisfaction, as well as convenience for sitting subjects he wouldn't normally have time for because of his teaching schedule.

Yet every time he tries to leave figurative painting, he's pulled back. It happened with 2002's Fela, Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, a work based on a photo he took of Fela Kuti in Nigeria years before, and with the spliff-smoking Roaring River Apostle of 2004.

"The newer figures are more informed by my photography," says Hendricks, who is stockpiling photos he hopes to use for a coming exhibition.

He is asked about the fact that his funky-but-chic figurative creations are so often tagged as "hip." Under normal circumstance, that would seem a compliment, yet here it creates a kind of uneasiness: Is celebrating something for its hipness not taking into account the seriousness of the art form and the artist's intention? Does it minimize the power and dynamic range, aesthetically and culturally, of his work?

Yes and yes, says Hendricks. "I wonder a lot about what people see and say about my work that really has nothing to do with how I approach it. At times they're just reaching for some kind of associations that validate their lack of knowledge of what I'm about. So I think you hit the nail right on the head.

"I don't paint for critics, I don't paint or do anything in terms of the public; I deal with what relates to what I want to do. What you see is what you get."

Hendricks All Around Town

"Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool," through Jan. 3, 2010, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 118-128 N. Broad St., 215-972-7600, www.pafa.org.

"Walkin' With Walker: Narrative Photography of Barkley Hendricks," Nov. 12-Jan. 2, 2010, the African American Museum, 701 Arch St., 215-574-0380, www.aampmuseum.org.

Barkley Hendricks' Caribbean landscape paintings, Nov. 6-Nov. 30, Sande Webster Gallery, 2006 Walnut St., 215- 636-9003, www.sandewebstergallery.com.