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...
by Barbara Downs | May 11, 2014
Because today is mother’s day, I’ll post photos of some of the pieces recently completed or in progress in my studio right now. I’m still working on images of babies and children, as I did last year with this encaustic series, In Memory of Childhood....
by Barbara Downs | Jan 10, 2014
In my last blog post, I hinted that I might paint some faces, and I have indeed done so. I’m not so interested in painting faces on the large-scale figure paintings because a face grabs all the attention. But I am certainly interested in faces, so here’s...
by Barbara Downs | Aug 31, 2013
Although I’ve been spending most of my time on the large figurative paintings, I am still working with bird imagery and other pieces based on the natural world. I just finished this drawing, Heron Double-Take. Thank you, Susana Arias for this LARGE sheet of...
by Barbara Downs | Aug 30, 2013
With Open Studios a month away, this is probably the last of the big paintings that I will complete for the time being. This painting went through the most drastic changes of any of this series. It hung on my wall for several months in a very different iteration,...
