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Barbara Adrienne Rosen

All my work is done on handmade paper.

I began by using only watercolor and colored inks but gradually added colored pencils, pastel and collage as the need arose. I use color as a language, a way of expressing my feelings.

Even during the difficult periods in my life my colors are still glowing and brilliant and growing more that way. People tell me that my paintings make them feel peaceful. I am not a peaceful person but I hope to grow more that way. My work is really one continuous painting under the title of , Landscapes of Heaven/ Visions of Paradise. Nature is my inspiration. It is all around me. But my work barely expresses the reverence that I feel for its infinite beauty. My work is also an expression of the spiritual journey that I began nearly thirty years ago.

For me, abstraction is based on observation. In the beginning my painting was an attempt to really see, to be as simple and clear as possible. That attempt was again and again and again. In a certain painting a decision was made to either paint a vase of exquisite yellow flowers or to carry that energy beyond the boundaries of the visual. Going beyond the purely visual was my liberation. I call it working on the edge, being open to possibility and intuition. Balance and color need to be harmonious. Many good paintings. Every once in awhile a small masterpiece.

I try to make my paintings as beautiful and sublime as possible. Without words, I hope they touch the viewer. Reaching into the still unknown, as in my spiritual practice, I try to return to the essence of myself.

Some Thoughts About Painting In the Year 2000

I love good abstract painting. It's always fresh and exciting to me. It pulls me in and opens me up to an endless range of ideas and possibilities. I never grow tired of it. Over many months and even years, I work on as many as eight paintings at one time, until one day one works and then another and another. Usually, two or three are completed at the same time. In this, a process unfolds. It is full of surprises, and I, never knowing where it will lead, try to stay open, take calculated risks, push up against my own fears of a wrong stroke or messing up a good beginning, push against my edges, go beyond my limitations to try to reach that unattainable perfection. For me, this is like spiritual practice, detail by detail. Finally, I acknowledge that color is my real strength, balance comes next. And somehow I am pulling out of painting what I can't yet pull out of my own life.

Most recently, in relation to the value of my work, these are the questions that I ask myself:

1. What is the purpose or value of my work?
2. How do I affect the viewer through my work?
3. How can my work touch and inspire the viewer to challenge himself/herself to reach his or her full potential?
4. Is painting a way for me to answer the unanswerable questions in my life?

 

Resumé

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Barbara Adrienne Rosen
124B Tinker St. Woodstock, New York 12498
(914) 679-3009

Barbara Rosen was born in the Bronx, New York in 1946. She attended UCLA majoring in dance and then painting and sculpture. She graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969 pursuing a career in pottery and then tilemaking until her first child was born in 1984.

In 1987 she used watercolors for the first time while experimenting with handmade paper. In 1989 she began showing at the Ann Leonard gallery in Woodstock, New York. In May of 1994 she had her first one-woman show at Mount Gulian, a small museum in Dutchess County.

She has exhibited with:

Ambrosia restaurant
The Elena Zang gallery in Woodstock, New York
The Woodstock Artists Association
The Gallery at Park West
New World Home Cooking Restaurant
Tthe Landau Grill in Woodstock
The Fleet Bank
Hudson United Bank
The Kleinert Gallery in Woodstock
The Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, New York

She also sells her work to private collectors in Los Angeles and Berkeley, California.

A show is planned for this fall at the Albert Shahinian Gallery in Poughkeepsie, New York.

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