Tres Pistoles by Barbara Coleman.
From her home and studio in the beautiful old tree-lined Huning Castle neighborhood of Albuquerque, NM, Barbara Coleman often takes a five-minute stroll down to the cottonwood-lined banks of the Rio Grande to paint in the open air. Other times, she may be out and about with (but safely socially distanced from) her painting buddies, many of them fellow members of the Plein Air Painters of New Mexico, capturing scenes ranging from nearby fields and orchards to the Sandia Mountains or the beautiful white cliffs in San Ysidro. Or she could be painting contentedly on her own, as she was this past October during a two-week artist’s residency amidst the landscape Georgia O’Keeffe immortalized in and around her Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, NM.
Barbara Coleman painting on location.
Regardless of her chosen location and subject, “I’m looking for beautiful patterns of light shapes and dark shapes,” says Coleman, explaining her loose, painterly style. She adds that “how the intense light-and-shadow pattern resolves into a mountain or a tree comes later” in the process. That approach to finding aesthetic order in the natural world makes sense for someone who earned a master’s degree in community and regional planning from the University of New Mexico, then taught urban design there as well as working as an urban designer and planner for the City of Albuquerque. Meanwhile Coleman, who studied art in France, continued to paint, winning awards from pastel societies before switching her focus to oils.
Pond Up North by Barbara Coleman.
The powerful results Coleman achieves through her pattern-oriented approach can be seen in her recent CLIFF FACES, a scene painted down the road from Ghost Ranch one morning. “What really intrigued me,” she says, “was how much color and reflected light there was in those sunlit faces. I tried to adjust the reflected light in the shadows to make the painting express my emotional experience as authentically as I could.” To learn more, visit https://www.barbaracoleman.com.
Cliff Faces by Barbara Coleman.
The Approach by Barbara Coleman.