December 2023-January2024 - Guest Artist: Barbara Krupp
A Lifetime of Exploration: Paintings by Barbara Krupp
Show Dates: November 28, 2023 - January 26
Receptions:
Friday, December 1, 2023
Friday, January 5, 2024
Meet Barbara Krupp
Barbara trained to be an x-ray technician. From that time on, as T.S. Eliot wrote in his “Whispers of Immortality,” I have seen “the skull beneath the skin.”
The structure of the painting is very important to her, and in her most recent series she has, in a manner of speaking, allowed the bones of the painting—both compositionally and metaphorically, become the painting’s’ subject matter.
Georgia O’Keeffe’s earlier 1940s series of pelvic bones enclosed spaces that later in the decade became forms themselves, she found the areas of interest in her own landscape and floral abstractions to be the atmospheric spaces between forms. She came to realize that the significance in her paintings was not in the forms, but in the spaces in between them.
In her “Barbara Gone Wild” series, those atmospheric spaces became increasing bounded by spontaneously drawn shapes. Painted in shades of ochre-tinted white –the color of bone-- the enclosed spaces began to take on shapes that suggested something as intimate and normally hidden as bone; organic shapes that suggest body parts unveiled here and there as though to tease a lover.
T.S. Eliot ends his poem with,” Our lot crawls between dry bones to keep our metaphysics warm.”
