Barrington Public Library is pleased to welcome the Friday Painters to the Main Floor Gallery and Barbara Meier to the Jennifer English Gallery.
Barbara Meier is a Rhode Island oil painter who is drawn to places where light transforms the familiar into something memorable. Through her paintings, she seeks to evoke not only the appearance of a landscape but the feeling of experiencing it.
Barb has been creating art her whole life and began painting in oils in 2009. Mostly self-taught, she enjoys experimenting with technique and expanding on ways to abstract and interpret what she sees. A workshop instructor once described her as a “painter’s painter”—someone who truly enjoys paint as an expressive, tactile, and vibrant medium full of possibilities.
Every Friday morning the group gathers in front of a street scene or a still life arranged by Ida. They work for two hours, then hold a critique. Ida’s support comes not in the form of technique, as in: “this is how you paint a teapot.” But rather, she encourages these growing artists to really look at the world – through value, color, shape and form – and to render what they see.
Some of the works in this exhibition were intended as finished pieces. But many represent the challenge these artists have set up for themselves – to engage directly with the world inside a narrow window of time and to transform it, through their own vision, into a work that is uniquely their own.
