by Barbara Downs | Aug 6, 2011
Titian, the great master, provides fertile ground with which to work. This particular painting, The Madonna Pesaro, has been on my mind for years. In my university days, I wrote a paper musing about the way that he turned an otherwise-static donor-family-in-the-corner...
by Barbara Downs | Aug 6, 2011
I just took a large-scale drawing workshop taught by my friend and fellow artist Claire Thorson. It was a wonderful class, and Claire is truly a gifted teacher. She created a classroom environment in which it felt safe to experiment, and gave us the tools to do so....
by Barbara Downs | May 26, 2011
A chair is a chair is a chair… unless it’s my latest project, a chair-ionette (thank you Tom Maderos, for the name of the thing). It’s not pretty, but it’s going to eventually be functional. Making a marionette out of a chair is more tricky...
by Barbara Downs | May 22, 2011
People who know me as a painter don’t always know that I also do sculpture. I tend to primarily work in one medium or the other for months at a time, and I am just now straying back into sculpture after having been painting for a few months. I do figurative...
by Barbara Downs | Mar 21, 2011
If it’s in my studio, it’s fair game for revision. That’s my motto, especially with paintings. This painting, Nice Girls (40″x40″, oil on canvas), shown here as a ‘before’ and ‘after’, was revised a year after I...
by Barbara Downs | Mar 3, 2011
My friend and fellow artist Susana Arias took this photo of me as we were talking. I happened to be positioned directly in front of a new canvas awaiting paint. So what does one do with a big, blank canvas? This one quickly turned into this painting. Please note that...
