Catherine Barnes.
Contemporary landscapes and reflections on classical Greece: the latest masterly works from British artist Catherine Barnes
By James Brewer
In between painting abstract landscapes, music-inspired canvases and seascapes, Catherine Barnes pursues her artistic passion for the world of ancient Greece.
Sussex-based artist Catherine has irons in all these fires – and fiery is sometimes the right description for her lavish suffusion of light and landscape – and has most recently been exhibiting a total of 50 works, at Islington Contemporary Art and Design Fair at Candid Galleries, London EC1.
Museum Reflection. Oil on paper. By Catherine Barnes.
The Candid Arts Trust show, on the weekend of November 20 and 21 2015, was populated by some four dozen artists, and enabled Catherine to highlight her varied palette of genres which is usually led by fresh work from her stunning collection bringing vivid colour combinations to seasonal vistas, and giving consummate play to luminosity magically evoking seashores and harbours.
While the intensively physical prospects are engendered by her sojourns and walks by northern European shores, Catherine has long been attracted to the uncanny persistence in the imagination of reflections of Greek antiquity.
Songs of September. Acrylic on canvas. By Catherine Barnes.
She is especially fond of visiting the National Archaeological museum in Athens, and of more modest establishments in Greek islands holding fragments from the scattered presence of the civilisation that once held sway over vast territory.
“In any Greek island, there is always a small museum exhibiting little heads from the past, ” she says. One of her favourite places is the museum by the port in Mykonos “with a superb collection of vases.” She smiles: “When I am sketching in the museum, which is usually rather quiet, one of the tabby cats that inhabit the island will come in and sit beside me.”
A painting on which Catherine is lately working stems from a visit to the Palaiokastro archaeological site on Limnos dating from 3, 500BC. “The discoveries that have been made there are marvellous, ” she enthuses. One is a temple of Athena over a huge hotel has been built, leaving the site visible but overgrown. Palaiokastro is a former name for Myrina, capital of the mid-Aegean island, which has had a turbulent history in fact and in myth – it was said to be the home of Hephaestus, the god of fire, metallurgy and volcanoes.
Midwinter Music. Acrylic on canvas. By Catherine Barnes.
The extent to which Catherine has become steeped in the aura of the Greek dominion can be seen in examples such as her composition Museum Reflection, oil on paper. This is based on an image of a bronze warrior with ringlets ‘exhumed’ from the sea off Calabria in 1972. The statue of the warrior, one of what are known as the Riace bronzes, is dated around 460 to 450BC, and Catherine superimposes its image on amphorae as though it were a phantom.
Another such picture is Paris Shadow, recalling what is known as the Antikythera wreck which was the subject of an exhibition at the National Archaeological Museum in 2014. The wreck of a heavily-laden cargoship from the 1st century BC was discovered by chance in 1901 off the east coast of Antikythera by sponge divers from Symi. It has been said that the cargo of bronze and marble statues, glassware, bronze vessels and gold jewellery attests to the beginning of the trade in art in the western world. A statue of Paris, who in Greek mythology was the son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy and who is blamed for the Trojan War, has been dated to between 350 and 330BC. Most intriguing find from the wreck was a mechanism that has been called “the world’s first computer.”
Seasons Change. Oil on canvas.
Catherine has shown her Greek- themed series at, among other events the June and July 2015 ‘Five Festival Sundays’ which was part of the Festival of Chichester.
Away from the Greek influence, back in England Catherine was commissioned by three young composers to paint a piece which would inspire them to write music for a Corpus Christi performance at Chichester University. This is an acrylic on canvas, Midwinter Music, which became the basis for one composition for choir, one of impressions for piano, and a third for gamelan… and led to further works in tune with this leitmotif.
“Often in the past I have painted to music and been inspired by the sound, but never had it been the other way round, ” Catherine remarked. “I found that I was almost sub-consciously including a treble clef. Knowing that the purpose was to be inspirational, I put in what you might call symbols that would trigger results.”
Harbour Horizon. Oil on board.
Describing the next acrylic, her Songs of September, Catherine said: “Having done that, I thought we should concentrate on autumn – and it has been the most glorious autumn, ” she exclaimed, referring to the last few weeks in southeast England and other parts of Britain. “The colours have been breathtaking, and so, as throughout my work all the time, there is a concern with light. When you deal with light, you are in a position of having to deal with reality, because it is the single source of light that puts you on this planet.
“To stray from the actual reality, I have used light in some places that is a gradating element suggestive of natural forms. Then I added something from the abstract, deliberately not necessarily representing reality. It was as though Watteau and Gainsborough were on each shoulder; and I was applying collage on top in intuitive movement, to make a harmonious rhythm.”
The result repays repeated study by the viewer, for a sense of order emerges from the sultry and seductive yellow vapour that envelops this work and surges towards a skylight. More kaleidoscopic in impact are the astonishing mixtures of colours used for In the South, oil on canvas, in which overlapping shapes vie for attention, and trees balance on a teetering horizon.
In the South. Oil on canvas. By Catherine Barnes.
In works with a more marine emphasis, Sussex and Normandy beaches and Pagham Harbour, Sussex, are among atmospheric scenes that have provided inspiration. The artist says that some of her ethereal paintings “contain a thousand or more thoughts whose outward signs are the brushstrokes, scrapings, scumblings, or simply marks which relate to the original drawings that may have been made 10 or so years previously.”
London-born Catherine, who has been a visiting lecturer in art history at Southampton University and as a visiting artist and lecturer at Southampton City Art Gallery, studied at Folkestone and then Camberwell School of Art and later took painting and history of art at Goldsmiths College. She was a founder member of Greenwich Printmakers. Catherine has participated in many art fairs and exhibitions in London, southeast England, Antwerp, and Dublin and at her current studio in Chichester. She was one of 10 artists who represented the UK at the 2011 Florence Biennale. She will have a solo exhibition at Chichester in March 2016.
There is more about Catherine Barnes at www.catherinebarnes.com
