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The influence of black and white portrait work is evident in
Barrow’s preference for muted tones and use of color and contrast
to create drama in her paintings.
In photography, particularly in black and white, artists rely heav-ily
on contrast and tonal manipulation to heighten the emotional
content of their work. In a comparable gesture, Barrow limits the
number of colors in most of her paintings. She focuses instead
on building different shades of each color, often employing both
extremely dark and extremely light elements in a single composi-tion,
as well as an energetic paint application to build excitement.
“I like really muted colors,” Barrow says. “I’m not a big fan of
paintings where the sky is very blue and the grass is very green,
and I spend a lot of time mixing my paint colors. When I took a trip
to South Africa, for example, I did several large paintings of ani-mals.
But most of them turned out very dark, really the opposite of
what I actually saw. That’s the fun part for me. I don’t want to just
copy what I’m looking at; I like to be creative and make the scene
my own.”
In “Seafoam,” Barrow lays down a large section of very bright
white paint to depict the foam in the painting’s title. She relies on
a subtle gray and dark blues and greens to create the rest of the
landscape.
Barrow sways toward the other end of the spectrum in “Purple
Landscape,” filling the canvas with a deep, dark purple. Her sketch-like
application of this intense color suggests both rolling hills and
swift-moving thunderclouds. She adds small sections of blinding
white to create dimension and a light source in the scene, along
with a thin horizon line of yellow and orange.
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