Travelling View

From the artist, Frances Barth: In my abstract/referential paintings, I think the shift from paint and experiential light to different perspectives and cartooned line, drawn with different mediums, breaks the sense of the experienced “place” that I am creating to cause a sense of pause or ‘slow time’. The tall vertical format of Travelling View places the viewer just at the point of being able to enter and rise up into the painting. There is a sense of discovery and expectation.

Beginning in the early 1970’s I started investigating ideas in my paintings which would create a pictorial space with multiple perspectival points of view. I wanted to find a way to introduce a non-specific narrative to abstraction. These shifting views would direct the viewer’s gaze, creating a hierarchy of meaning that could shift and re-combine. The complex space had attributes of both volume and flatness. The color was made from layers of colors that were perceived as optically mixed.

In the 1980’s I began incorporating other forms and images into my paintings, which pushed them into a realm that existed between landscape, mapping, animation, and abstraction. These ideas have been present in my painting ever since. Along with the idea of slow time in the reading of the painting, which for me made it more experiential, I want to chart a different time-based geologic story in each painting which could only exist in deep time.

I am also interested in how different cultures represent “reality,” visual information, and mapped ideas. I incorporate methods of modeling, diagramming, mapping symbols and charting into the work. I don’t want the paintings to look overwhelmed by the conceptions. I want the paintings to have a seeming ease in how everything interacts, and also to create a phenomenon of naturalistic light.

The color in the paintings involves ideas of local, atmospheric, and abstract color. I want to make natural light and abstract color act as light and location in the same painting, creating a believable space and experience that could never have existed in any other way.