Art in New England
October/November 2006

By Jan Lhormer

Deborah Barlow's featured show of abstract paintings at the Lyman Eyer Gallery in Provincetown invites the viewer into a radiant and infinite space. The palette immediately reflects a sense of place that is clearly not New England. Having grown up in California and spent time in Utah, Barlow brings grand vistas and desert air to the cramped streets of Provincetown. Her love of travel to remote places, often Third World countries, also informs the exotic flavor of the layered, fluid surfaces. Textures of ancient stone or textile remnants and ripples of aqua oceans alternately imply their stories.

The show consists of twenty-four pieces including 10-, 12-, and 14-inch square oil paintings in crimson, burnt orange, and gold, painted on wood, canvas, and silk. An Asian sensibility permeates the 57-inch-by-26-inch scroll paintings on Stonehenge printmaking paper in mystical, meditative blues. The two largest pieces, Farris and Lylla, are done in subtle cream colors and silver, recalling Agnes Martin's enchanting white canvases and the energy of a Jackson Pollock

Barlow combines minimalism and "maximalism" to fuse a unique vision. She erases all linear or representational references, leaving the viewer scrambling for visual orientation. A deep sense of form underlies the complex, nonobjective picture plan, linking the work to landscape and elements of nature. Turner's late paintings of sea and sky in swirling light and color come to mind; yet while Barlow's surfaces are highly active, unlike Turner there is no trace of brushwork, adding to the mystery of the process.

The show marks Barlow's seventh season exhibiting with Lyman Eyer Gallery, and her fourth solo show this year. A prolific painter, she titles the pieces after places she's been, although she intends for the images to live without text. Her creativity celebrates visual language as a transformative, primitive and elemental power.

The Seen and the Unseen
Provincetown Magazine
June 24, 2004

By Brenner Thomas

For Deborah Barlow, who is showing at Lyman-Eyer for her fifth consecutive year, painting is a mystery, the process is a mystery and she likes it that way. In a poetic sense, she says her paintings “invite you to view the space between what is hidden and what is seen.” In a more formal way, her images are deeply layered invocations of landscapes that strike her, cultures that move her or ancient relics that fire her imagination.

Though she too likes to work in series, the work’s ties to realism are less clear. Her most representational paintings to date were generated about of her trip to the Celtic coastline and her fascination with the ancient stone circles found there. Dating back 4000-5000 years, these huge stones are little understood. Deborah calls this "the most profound" journey of her life; the mystery of those monolith made a lasting impression. Her work of that period made use of rough, stone-like shapes in loosely organized compositions—aerial views of what she had seen from the ground.

The new paintings—there’ll be as many as 15—were all made within the last four months and consist mostly of what she’s calling a Scroll Series, vertically oriented canvases measuring 20” x 50.” It’s a new dimension for the artist, one she explains is part of the Asian artistic tradition. That tradition, she went on to say, was about the sublime, the vertical orientation leading your eye up from say the peasant fishing at the bottom to transcendent snow capped mountains. She wanted to use the dimension to generate a different experience. She thinks of the pieces as a door—they are about the same size—and wants the viewer to empathize, to enter into them.

And how do they look? Deborah, who is also represented by two other galleries in the US and one is Ireland, says she’s been working tighter, smaller. She still uses a lot of layers—40 or 50, the last 15 of which are oil—but it’s now less clear where one layer begins and another ends. There is less demarcation between foreground and background, one less clear reference in her work.

Most of the images are named after places she’s been, like “Bermasa,” an exquisite articulation in red and gold. But you’re never really looking at a place. Deborah says the titles are like names for humans. It’s a helpful way to keep track of things, but your experience of that human does not require the knowledge of their name. “It doesn’t necessarily reflect who they are,” says Deborah. “I want my pieces to live without text.”

Then how do you explain landscapes that are rendered in a nonrepresentational way? If pressed, you could say that her paintings resemble worn fabric or blurred satellite images of the earth’s topography, softly undulating spangles of color and form. But they are, if anything, internal landscapes, evocations of the way places and things have made Deborah think or feel. Don’t look for the bloodied atmosphere of “Camas” on any globe. That image resides in the map of her psyche.

The sources for her work come in the form of anything Deborah doesn’t understand. New books, new ideas, new places, new people. Anything scary, inscrutable, mysterious. She says she never gets bored that way. “Art is like sex,” she muses. “It is always different.”

Mystery has become part of her artistic process too. She likes using new and unusual materials like rice paper, marble dust, silk and foil. She likes experimenting with the way these materials absorb pigment successively. She never wants the creative process to be programmatic or too controlled. “I do respect the mystery,” Deborah explains, “and do unconsciously set it up so that whenever things start getting safe, something in me throws it off.”

She says the best description of her work she’s ever heard came from a 14 year old Irish boy during of her openings in that country. “I think I understand your work,” he suggested. “You’re painting the backside of things.” She liked it so well she asked him if she could quote him on it. It’s a apt description of her creative journey, of how she takes a landscape and turns it inside out, making it her own. It’s a good evocation of abstraction too, that process by which you take something unseen and unknowable and make it real, extant, seeable—all the things you can’t decipher even though they are there.