TitleViolet
Artist
Frances Barth
(American, b. 1946)
Date2010
MediumAcrylic on panel
DimensionsUnframed: 25 x 36 in.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, March 7, 2012
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Gift of the Artist, 2012
Object number2012.4
Label TextFrances Barth refers to aspects of her work as a combination of comic restraint and purist abstraction. Combining contradictory elements of local color with abstract color, vocabularies of both painting and drawing, and disorienting spatial relationships, the artist creates works that are as provocatively ambiguous as they are soothingly beautiful. In her desire to "tell stories without words" Barth implies narratives and geographies in a realm between landscape, mapping and abstraction. The narratives in the paintings are stories taking place over a period of geological time, with references both topographic and tectonic, alluding to simultaneous multiple histories. The light that Barth creates within her paintings is a spell-binding presence that shifts the picture plane into a deep dimensional space at the same time that her compositional shifts in scale destabilize. Speaking on her use of color the artist refers to her desire to create "big areas of ungracious color - chemical color that doesn't exist in nature - to open up like the sky but not be sky."
