Emerging Artists | Barbara Coleman - Southwest Art Magazine

Following her North Star

Barbara Coleman, Pond Up North, oil, 10 x 12.

This story was featured in the May 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art May 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

A whistling sea breeze, the warmth of the desert sun, ripples of reflected color dancing across a pond—these are just a few of the sights, sounds, and feelings in nature that have guided the hand and brush of Barbara Coleman. “I don’t think anything settles me as deeply in the present moment as plein-air painting,” says the Albuquerque, NM, artist. “That old saying, ‘Everything is connected’—that’s what happens when I’m painting landscapes en plein air.”

As a teenager, Coleman was a gifted ceramicist, but her creative path took a major turn when she spent her junior year of college studying art in Aix-en-Provence, France. There, amid the old stomping grounds of famed French painter Paul Cézanne, the artist discovered a passion for painting. “From that point on, painting became the North Star in my life,” she says. Indeed, over the ensuing decades, Coleman always made time to paint, even after starting a family and while working as a city planner and urban designer and, later, as a professor of art and design. But when her mother passed away about 16 years ago, the profound loss prompted the artist to contemplate her future. “I seriously considered the question, ‘What if you only had a year to live?’” she says.

: Barbara Coleman, Wharf at Monterey, oil, 10 x 8.

: Barbara Coleman, Eternity Is Not Later, oil, 22 x 30.

: Barbara Coleman, Gratitude, oil, 11 x 14.

It led to a “huge inner shift,” says Coleman, who took a yearlong sabbatical from teaching before leaving her position permanently to paint full time. A longtime pastelist, she also started to paint with oils, and today she can’t live without the creative opportunities they offer her, from mixing color to “pushing the paint around” on her surfaces. The stunning value design and bravura brushwork in POND UP NORTH, which garnered Best of Show in Plein Air Painters of New Mexico’s national show last year, exemplifies Coleman’s knack for capturing the mood of a scene with the sensitive acuity of a poet. “For me, it really is about seeing beauty,” says the artist. “There was a poignant moment in my youth when my father died, and the world felt really gray. I was outside looking at this rose, and as I looked at it, it transformed into the most exquisite being of shape and color. There was no separation between me and the rose. It transformed my life. I thought, ‘If I can just see beauty, I’ll be okay.’” —Kim Agricola

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