by Barbara Downs | May 6, 2015
I’m back in Iceland, taking a lot of photos for later use in the studio, as inspiration for drawings and paintings. The horizon line is not as prominent in this one as in some of the other photos I’ve taken (and in all of the drawings), but I like that...
by Barbara Downs | Mar 11, 2015
Another Iceland drawing (see this post for the first two). This one, though done with drawing materials, feels like a painting to me. As is usually the case, the scale of these drawings seems important to me, so here is the obligatory studio shot with my yellow...
by Barbara Downs | Jan 11, 2015
I don’t normally engage in magical thinking, but I do believe in the power of art. I needed a talisman, for personal reasons, so I edited my two recent large landscape drawings to add doors to the buildings. I felt that I need an entrance to that stark world....
by Barbara Downs | Dec 3, 2014
I get asked all the time how I go about starting a painting. Do I work from a drawing that I then copy onto the canvas? Directly from a model? Or from photos? Do I sketch first on the canvas? With charcoal? Pencil? Paint? Truth be told, I don’t have a single...
by Barbara Downs | Jul 22, 2014
I’m still in Iceland, trying to dissect the landscape by considering just small portions of it at a time: the colors and shapes of the pebbles on which I’m walking, the yellow dandelions growing amidst the black volcanic rock. The landscape as a whole...
