Many things have shaped the work Mary Barnes creates, but high on the list is family. Having nine siblings—from a blended family—meant that outside activities were a major component of the construct of daily life growing up just outside Boston. She summered on Mount Desert Island with her father and his family—including her uncle Edward Larrabee Barnes, noted architect of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Her mother’s mother kept a journal filled with small drawings of places and events, the people in her life, including all the grandchildren at play.
And so water and trees, sailing and skiing, hiking—and the work of the hand making art—were all part of her visual foundation.
Since then, she has lived on the West Coast and East, until eight years ago when she moved from New York City to Sedgwick, where, off a dirt road, she works in a pristine, open studio, lichen and stones and trees a footstep outside her door. She need only walk along a low meandering plank walkway through the woods to her home and a spectacular view of the bay.
Although Barnes has worked, and believes will work again, in oils on canvas—often very large canvas—today she makes drawings—15 inches by 15 inches, 21 by 21, 42 by 30, and recently 26 by 72—that defy the traditional interpretation of that word. On both sides of double matte Mylar, she creates marks with ink and water-soluble graphite pencil, pastel, and oil. Working on both sides creates the illusion of intense depth, and seduces the viewer into her world, whether they know where they are going or not. Sometimes Barnes stitches, collaging elements together as she explores the boundaries and edges of the internal and external.
Working four or five hours a day, five days a week, for several months, she knows when “the tide has gone out” and it must come back in again, trusting that when she takes a break to replenish—plant a garden, travel, go skiing—no matter how long the break is, she will not lose the ability to make the work. Letting go and trusting are key techniques in making her art, and, she says, living her life. Often, she works quickly, telling herself “to just go for it, even if the ‘it’ is not yet clear.” She stops when she “feels there’s a visual tension across the surface, every component is playing a role, and not all the answers are revealed.”
Barnes received her BA from Colorado College, her BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art, and her MFA from Columbia University. Her paintings and drawings have been included in many solo and invitational exhibitions in the Northeast and Northwest. She is represented by Turtle Gallery in Deer Isle and Ten High Street in Camden. Her work was selected for Four in Maine: Drawing, currently at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, and for the Peninsula Painters show at Shaw Jewelry in Northeast Harbor. Her 2011 solo exhibitions include Turtle Gallery and Fred Giampietro Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.
Early on you were a printmaker. Does that influence the work you now make?
Printmakers work elementally as far as how they make and develop. I still do. I loved the making, the process, but the technique of printmaking was ahead of my ideas of what I wanted to express, or my ability to express the ideas that I had. And that’s when I went looking for an art school that had a strong foundation base.
And how did your educational experience shape you as a working artist?
At Pacific Northwest College of Art the faculty was very active as artists and that very much shaped how I work, how I approach my work, the emotional component. I’m not an intellectual artist. I’m an emotional and intuitive artist. I’m not always reaching for a context of where I fit art historically or what the intellectual reasons for what I do are.
How do you start a piece?
I start with just an idea, not a concept of the whole piece, and then it’s a dance between intuition and problem solving. I start in one place and then I respond to what’s there; I evaluate that change and add things as I emotionally see the components developing and interacting. And I keep putting myself in the places where I visually don’t know quite what I am doing. I know there are multiple realities in a piece, and I trust that. That’s actually the way I see life, too. I don’t see it as just one way. I see it as multiple realities and juxtapositions.
The vocabulary of your drawings is not what most people would see as “drawing.” Could you talk about how you see drawing?
Drawing for me has always been about the immediate contact and expressiveness of your hand on the surface with a given material. Charcoal and paper, yes, fit that description. But I’m also interested in fluidity and happenstance, and so I use liquid as part of my drawing process.
What materials do you use?
On the dry side of things, I use a graphite pencil and pastel, and then on the wet side of things, I use oil paint, typically an oil stick, and ink. The graphite pencil I use is capable of dissolving in water just as other graphite pencils are capable of dissolving in paint thinner. And so I can draw in the ink with the pencil—that’s when they really cross over. I can use the pencil dry. I can use it dry through water, or I can use it dipped in water. It all gives a different kind of fluidity to the line.
And you work on Mylar.
Yes. I began working with Mylar in the ’80s, but not in this way. I stopped and then returned to it [about 10 years ago]. I was struggling with the infiltration of computers in the making of art—people projecting images onto canvas and then painting those images, the manipulating—and the lack of emotion that I felt was in the line. The “human” was being lost. I was asking myself what I could do that was new, different, but couldn’t be made by the computer—something that carries the evidence of the hand. The vulnerable qualities of fluidity in this work bring in the presence of the human being in a way that should not, I think, be underestimated.
Those drawings on the wall, although they are very different, have a similar feel. Are they a series?
I really don’t work in series; I set my parameters in terms of materials and size rather than subject matter. But I do believe that the drawings in any given nine-month period will be connected because of the time and place in my life. There’ll be a continuity. Those five were all done in the last four weeks, and they will hang there for a while until I can see that they each hold themselves.
Edges are very apparent in your work. Is the edge a place of joining? Or difference? A demarcation?
The edge comes up in two ways. In the physical world, for me the edge is about transition—so where the water meets the land or trees meet the ground. It’s where things find their connection. But edge also comes up a lot for me in the making of the shapes and forms. I put myself in the work and travel along the edge of shapes. I’m an explorer. I climb over my drawings visually.
What other things support or contribute to the work, feed you creatively?
I do a fair amount of reading of fiction. I just read a wonderful book, The Tiger’s Wife, full of folklore, abstraction, color—the juxtaposition of nonrational images! And talking with artists of other mediums, other disciplines—someone who works three-dimensionally, a potter or a choreographer, a writer, musician—those are the people who get me thinking differently about the approach to my own work.
