Learning To See with Lucy Barber

Kohlrabi and papaya, berries and beets. Asparagus, oranges and turnips and pears.

Not the recipe for the world’s worst fruit salad, but some of the many subjects and sources of inspiration for painter Lucy Barber, whose career as an artist has seen her pay particular attention to the art of the still life, returning again and again to that controlled world of composition and calm.

“It’s a great way of learning how to see,” Barber says. She’s seated in her Central Avenue studio, smaller works dotting the walls, many of them still life paintings. She’s been in the space since 2015, with its shotgun layout, tall ceiling and broad windows with the shades largely drawn. “Artists have to see things differently,” she says. “And still life is all about learning how to see.”

But this painter first learned to see through the lens of a camera.

“It’s all I wanted to do,” Barber says, thinking back to her high school days. It was all the magic of film then, capturing images in silver and light with the click of a button. She caught the bug and she caught it bad. High school photography classes soon turned into enrollment at the Pratt Institute, where she studied fine art photography and graduated with honors.

“I learned to look at the world through the frame of a square-format camera,” she says. And she was good at it. She learned about composition and framing, how to look for the light and appreciate its nuances. And as a photographer, Barber showed her work for 10 years. Still, something about it all left her creatively restless. “I was inspired by light,” she says, “but it was all black and white.”

And Barber wanted to see more.

Nevertheless, Barber credits those years exploring black and white composition as a “vital use of time” and integral to her development as an artist and painter.

“Because it’s actually value that’s more important than color,” she says, and successful composition relies more on understanding the importance of lightness and darkness, and how these aspects direct the eye across the canvas, than it does on the particular colors used.

“Color gets all the credit,” she says, “but value does all the work.”

And I still love the square.”

She would just rather it have a bit more color in it. Maybe because she was reading Josef Albers.

Barber cast a wide net looking for something new. She took courses in graphic design and dabbled in textiles, weaving and the like. None of it stuck, but, although the medium wasn’t quite right, Barber knew she was somewhere close to where she wanted to be. “I was playing with color,” she says. “And by doing that, I realized that I wanted to paint.” What started as neighborhood lessons from a friend quickly turned into studying at Brooklyn College under the tutelage of Lennart Anderson, the acclaimed painter and educator known for, among other things, his expertise in still life.

“It’s like the floodgates opened up,” she says. “Like seeing the world in a different way.”

Today, a perusal of Barber’s portfolio reveals the impact of this new way of seeing on her artist’s journey, with canvas after canvas filled with fruits and vegetables and jars and bottles, vases and boxes and ink wells and poppies. And like Lennart, she unearths the sacred in the mundane, imbuing each with a certain import that can only derive from an artist’s true examination—from the undeniable fact, carried through with each stroke of the brush, that someone truly cared.

Barber calls it “seeing within seeing,” when she enters that space where the artist’s eye can safely take over, dissolving the world into forms and shapes, light and line. Perhaps not the best mode of vision when making split-second decisions in rush hour traffic, but essential to the artist’s exercise. “The more you look at something, the more you see,” she says. “There’s this nested unfolding.” And just maybe, if an artist is attentive enough, they can see into the stuff of creation, the hidden patterns that dictate the warp of the world.

“There’s so much to discover,” she says.

And the same is true when viewing her art.

Painted in oils on canvas or muslin, much of the work first appears as straightforward studies in produce portraiture. See the kohlrabi. Appreciate the delicate color transitions in the purples of the bulb and the greens of its leaves. Admire the atmosphere created through bold brushstrokes and soft messy edges. Acknowledge the technical prowess and skill on display.

But a further look is well-rewarded and spending time with the lot reaps ever greater returns, as Barber’s compositional skills work their magic, inviting the imagination and revealing, among other things, what just might be a cheeky sense of humor.

On one canvas, a head of broccoli becomes a towering tree. On another, we encounter the unexpectedly whimsical side of beet taproots, who somehow appear to be having a rather animated conversation, despite being fixed by paint and lacking mouths altogether. One early series from 2004 almost appears as a presentation of vacation photos from a strawberry abroad—as the subject poses first by the black vase, then lounges in the bowl, then posing by a green vase and then back to the black one.

And in one very early work, we see a lone fallen green pepper, mourned by a pair of journals hooded like the Virgin Mary, a "Pieta" of produce.

As Barber would say, “The more you see, the more you see.”

Some of the work seems to blur the line between still life and landscape, an observation Barber takes no issue with. “You can have objects on a table that have a landscape feel to them,” she says, just as houses on the horizon may “be like objects on a shelf.” And her latest series, "Water and Sky," is devoted entirely to landscape painting. Just, ya know, minus the land.

“I see a correspondence between still life and landscape,” Barber says. “If all I’m concerned about are light, form and space—the relationship of forms to each other—I can explore the same ideas in a still life and in a landscape.”

All art is an abstraction."