Barry is a UK based Welsh Artist born in Merthyr Tydfil and currently residing and working near the market town of Hay-On-Wye in the Welsh Marches. He studied HND Photography and BA Illustration at Hereford College of Art desiring to learn about different aspects of image making in order to incorporate these disciplines back into his lifelong passion for painting. His work is currently focusing on a collection of contemporary atmospheric Welsh Landscapes employing an alchemy of inks, pigments, solutions, soot, ash, charcoal, tannin, metal powders, graphite and anything else that happens to fall in his path.

 

(Quotes)

“My work is about mood, atmosphere, suggestion, texture and light. I have limited interest in accurate pictorial representation. My heart lies with that fleeting first sense of a place observed for the first time with open eyes and an unbiased heart and mind. My primary drive in approaching landscape painting and drawing is not to ‘only’ capture the physical reality of that scene,  but to ‘fuel’ this depiction with the feelings, sensations and emotions that the place inspired in me. This recent work is a collection and thus a celebration of Welsh Landscapes. I deeply love Wales and despite where I travel in the world its diversity and boundless beauty keep it very close to me, there is almost a genetic familiarity that tells my soul and senses that it is truly home.“

 

​“I suppose I am predominantly a builder. I adore the pure and innocent sheer joy of creating something from a collection of base elements, a suggestion of a treeline from a hand made solution of ink, soot, metal powders and boiled down tannin from oak shavings. The suggestion of a stone wall by relief printing hessian with a hand full of sawdust or sand or powdered pigments. I also love to let nature play its part in my work, often leaving plates or paintings in the wind and rain for a time, overnight or even for several days. I employ gravity, time and the elements to create my work.

 

Earth is pigments and other powders or raw materials, water is the carrier and suspending agent, air is the wind, a hairdryer or blowing through straws, and fire is heat, perhaps popping either the piece or its elements on a hotplate, or in the oven, or using a hot air gun to force drying. On the one hand I seek to bend the solutions to my will,  on the other I am constantly studying the process and allowing the opportunity for serendipity and the happy accident by being ready to step back and relinquish control at any given moment.

 

When attempting to paint emotion and feeling I often find it is the loosest, most spontaneous, most relaxed and often the least considered or interfered with marks that often capture those sentiments best. However it must also be said that this is an inherently risky business. I fully admit to ‘most‘ of my explorations ending with myself and an embarrassing amount of ruined paper laying in a soggy blackened heap in the corner! I am forever grasping at shadows, waiting for the faint outline of a hill or bank of trees to emerge from the chaos and disorder of my alchemy of solutions, and all too often loosing it again as it dries and moves past that perfect point I was chasing!“

 

​​