The first image is my kindergarten son's abstact composition. The second is my newest painting "Freedom". My son's art desk is in my studio area and we defintely influence each other. I love the way his work fills the picture plane and I can even start to see a horse head in the upper right. Maybe I was influenced by him more than I even thought. The third image I call "Flight". I'm trying to "paint out loud" as Bob Burridge says and not cover up all of the magic that juicy paint makes.

I'm feeling at peace about my painting which is wonderful and unusual. I wrote a new statement to guide me and keep me focused:

I paint to go on a journey of discovery and feel as though my art making is like dreaming with paint. My painting technique is multi-layered and flows from wet paint and its textures into forms and back into surrounding spaces. My intention is for the paintings to convey a thought, emotion or experience and be read like a nonlinear story or dream rather than an exact representation. Therefore the work is open for viewers to also make their own meanings and interpretations.
I enjoy pushing and pulling the layers of paint. I believe this technique of layering and using textures to unify a work derives from my experiences with the computer program Adobe Photoshop. As a graphic designer and computer illustrator I used this program extensively. Painting on textured surfaces gives some physical space for the layers’ existence and the quick drying time of acrylics allows for immediate layering. From 2002 through 2006, I began acrylic paintings without any preconceived idea in mind and was surprised that figures appeared in my work and that I was interested in the passage of time and generations. Now I am bringing my artistic language of emotive color, expressive brush strokes, free flowing paint, textures and layering together to express intangibles like thoughts, feelings and beliefs. I am currently focusing on a subject immersed in its environment or nature and a feeling of freedom from that immersion.

M.T.'s Chop House
34th Street (just South of Archer Road at
former putt-putt site), Gainesville, FL
Bar counter installation and on going
solo exhibition of works for sale
Open for dinner nightly at 5 pm
call 338-7477 for more information

November 17, 7 to 8 pm
Third Eye Spoken
Participating in Art Gallery for Poetry event.
Held at Unity Church, 8801 NW 39th Ave.
across from Shands at Vista.

November 17 - February 10
Central Medical Plaza
Watermedia Exhibition.
New plaza is on Newberry Road.

Rotating pieces available at the Paddiwhack Shop:
http://www.paddiwhack.com/

I'm really happy with my new painting but it was total anguish to get it started in the right direction. I hope that I have learned about working and will be able to fall into a painting groove for a while and get some consistent pieces. I've learned that it has to start wet and loose. I have to push the painting until it pulls me. Tells me what it wants to be but still hold a grand intention in the back of my mind of what it should be. I started the painting to be about my back yard but then it looked like leaves and flowers. It was decorative without any solid forms. I was scared to let it develope into anything and I was playing it safe with my intentions.
But what I really want to paint are intangibles. Things hard to explain or understand, like the human spirit and soul, time, love, the boundries of the universe, the connections to the past through our ancestors, the capacities of the brain and thoughts. I am not interested in expressing my personal experience but the essence of all our experiences. I love drawing the human figure from life and have been thinking about it emersed in nature. I love abstract compostions that express thoughts and emotions. I like them to fill the space with interesting shapes not be like a landscape . My kindergarten son is drawing lots of abstract compositions, just drawing shapes and filling them with color. They are beautiful, I think I might post one tomorrow.

This painting has really been driving me crazy. It got really inconsistently painted overall when I started adding more colors. I might have salvaged it by adding more black overall to bring it back together. I realize that it has no composition to lead or rest the eye which is a problem. I am glad to be done with the painting and I hope something good comes from it but I am ready to move on. I am anxious to get started on some assignments I received in the mail from Bob Burridges' workshops. I am looking forward to "having more meaningful intentions in my artwork" and better abstract compositions. My goal is to be able to fill a gallery with my work and have it look like it was all done by the same artist, have gorgeous color, interesting compositions, excitement and organic beauty. I want it to tell a story of an utopia where humankind and nature live harmoniously and peacefully with each other.

I'm working on a new painting to benefit an aid project to Swaziland, Africa. It feels good to do something I love and help out a worthy cause. My ideas of a Jacob's Ladder coincided with this project and resulted in this painting called "Soul Passages: A Tribute to the AIDS Victims of Swaizland". The painting is not finished and I am still seeing faces in it and painting them in.
I want to paint happy paintings to lift the spirit but this one is turning out dark and sad. If no one wants to buy prints of it, I hope it can at least be used to raise awareness for their cause.

I haven't been able to paint since September 24 because I'm getting ready for the upcoming Thornebrook Art Show. I will have a nice set of prints for sale and I'm proud of their quality. My husband cut the mats for me and that really helped speed the process along. It would have taken me the rest of the week to do myself.
It seems like months since I have painted, although it has been weeks. It is too bad I had to interrupt the process because I had four directions I wanted to go in and develop further. Now I am behind on graphic design work also, but hopefully I can paint this week. I am almost intimidated to start again but if I am not painting I feel like the life is draining from me. I need it like air or water. Or maybe it is not that essential. I need it like physical exercise to feel alive and healthy.

I'm posting pictures from the SCORE space where I hung my work for the Artwalk this past Friday night. I had a wonderful night. A lot of people came through that were really excited about the work. You could see a sparkle in their eyes and a connection to the art with their minds, that's a benefit I never expected when showing my work. I always thought it would be awful to try to sell anything for a living but then I sold my first piece at an art show and was hooked. The people taking the Artwalk are a concentrated group who love art and that makes it even more fun for the artist.
I sold the "Garden Madonna" painting and three prints, topping off the evening beautifully.

Aspirations: Beautiful color as from nature, a butterfly, a flower or the mountains at sunset but not rainbow bright as from an eight pack of crayons. Dreamlike and stylized images but not cartoonlike. Not flat space but thick, layered and atmospheric created from a variation of marks and values.

I have gotten interested in another series' direction which is a "Jacob's Ladder". This idea goes along with the "time travelers" from some of my earlier paintings. I hit on the idea while painting the "Florida Ladder" painting and was surprised how this very different visual followed the same thoughts as some of my previous paintings. These thoughts include different generations that pass simultaneously, as if time were compressed and had no linear boundries.

I participated in the first Haile Village Art Festival this past weekend. There were sixty local artists and that made it really fun, everyone seemed to know everyone in one way or another. It was brutally hot but the first two hours could not have been better. The local villagers came out walking with their children and/or dogs and were so pleasant. A great sense of community, a relaxing beautiful setting and true excitement about art.

Wassily Kandinsky. The Blue Mountain. 1908/09. Oil on canvas. 106 x 96.6 cm. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA.

Thinking about abstract compositions , I looked up the work of the master, Kandinsky. I was fascinated by his transitional work, the paintings that were moving from natural representation to abstraction. Kandinsky found complex compositions in nature, capturing buildings, trees, and people in a compressed space filling the picture plane. He simplified the individual forms and differentiated them with black outlines but the shapes were filled with texture and vivid color. Many things were complex in these paintings such as texture, color, line and composition but the forms were simple. He then carried over the same visual language and elements into his improvisations.

While I was sitting at the mall for a weekend art show, I wrote some directions I wanted my art to take. I thought I should record them here.
Subject matter not important, style and way of working is, how the artist views the world.
My style: loose, liquid, fast, detail at the last, random, natural, organic.
Set up compositions, have the painting work abstractly, exciting.
Layering, collage-like, transparencies.
Dynamic,eye catching, movement.
Soft to sharp, wet paint to calligraphic line.
Vivid color.

Next painting thought: A web of thick layered space from which three dimensional forms emerge. I want more dimension and illusion of space.

I think I like the detail cropping of both paintings better than seeing the entire paintings. Maybe I should think of being up close when I start the next painting. This is a more modernist approach to art. But then I struggle with making good compostions and having a focal point.

I finished "An Ode to a Pearl Morpho" I was obsessed about finishing it, not even listening to music while painting just working on it feverishly until it was done. My hope is that a viewer would see it first as a nice butterfly and then notice and be surprised by the images in the wings. I have trouble seeing it that way since I created it so I don't know if that is working.

This is the first of the tree paintings that I described on Monday.

This is a detail from the butterfly painting that is in progress. You can see how the butterfly markings are becoming faces.

Since this is my first posting it might be a little longer than subsequent ones but I will plunge into what is going on now and you can see my history on my web site www.carolbarber.com

I am interested in several new directions my art is taking me simultaneously. I have been struggling with making good compostions when I am painting in an improvistional manner. To remedy this, I felt I needed the painting to start with some type of defined boundary or structure. With Fish'N Fish I happened on making many fish within the image of a larger fish. Now I am doing a larger piece that is a butterfly and being more daring by making the markings of the butterfly form images from a free stream of consciousness (or subconscious, I'm not sure). There are lots of faces appearing in this painting. It is what I call dream painting when the images emerge from wet paint. This is also the first painting that I have done on Masonite and it is allowing me to create more textures such as with gesso. I enjoy allowing the thin liquid paint to puddle on the board and then pulling thick paint over the textures.
Following the same idea of beginning a painting with one dominant image, I have also begun some "tree spirit" paintings. I had a dream of forming the space around a tree into imagery such as birds and horses. But when I went down the street to sketch one of our beautiful Live Oak trees I was blown away by all of the imagery that I saw within the tree. It was as if a lady was standing in the middle and there were two faces guarding her on each side. It made me want to write about her which I have never done any creative writing. I was thinking about how long she has been standing there with no one noticing.
The colors are nice on the first tree painting but I believe I need to zoom in closer on the tree to make the overall painting's composition better.