Carol Barber

Carol Barber has been working as a professional visual artist for over  twenty-five years, first as an illustrator and graphic designer and now as an educator and exhibiting artist. Barber’s solo exhibit, A Year in Gestures was held at the Welcome Gallery, presented by New City Arts of Charlottesville, VA in 2020. Her work appears in collections across the United States and is featured on five Chestnut Oak Vineyard wine labels. Among her numerous awards and honors, Barber is the recipient of the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild’s Award of Excellence.  She received her B.F.A. from James Madison University and a M.F.A. from Radford University. Her studio is located in a quiet spot in Barboursville, VA surrounded by land in a  conservation easement.

I balance gesturally immediate marks with compositional design and develop a work over time. Tempering my impatience and allowing a work to transform is essential. This negotiation involves composing and interacting with the drawn lines from previous layers of my applications. My choice of colors and mark making is intuitively reacting to what the media is doing on the substrate and the outside influences of noise, current events and nature. It is important for me that the work has an atmospheric quality resulting from layering, deconstructing and constructing.