Botanical Painting

Barbara Adrienne Rosen Works on Paper & Canvas • Contact ________________________________________ BIOGRAPHY What is abstract art? Like music, it allows us to transcend our own world and experience a total different reality. Through the use of color, line and form, abstract art is capable of transmitting expressive, historical, even philosophical information. But first, we need to cultivate the skills of imagination, non-concrete thinking, and intuition. And we need to trust our instinctive reactions, how we feel when we first confront a work of art that is foreign to our habitual or conventional way of seeing the world. There is so much that we miss. My painting began in play, from the pure pleasure of applying color and paint to paper and canvas. When I first began to paint my goal was to see and really observe the simplicity and the clarity of things in life. That attempt was repeated again and again. In a certain painting a decision was made to carry the energy of some exquisite yellow flowers beyond the boundaries of the visual. Being open to intuition and possibility and finding the balance between color and form became my goal. That was my liberation surpassing my original vision. I see the abstract everywhere; the stones in a stream, rushing water, the mold on a tree, a cloud in a landscape, and the landscape itself. At first, when I returned to painting, my abstractions required only watercolor and inks. Gradually, I added colored pencils, pastels, and collage, as the need arose. For the last fifteen years I have used mainly handmade paper. And finally I moved from watercolor to acrylic for the greater flexibility I found in the new medium. Originally, I was a realistic painter. One day I was painting a vase of beautiful yellow daffodils. The yellow of those daffodils was so powerful and alive. The color rose up and seemed to fill the entire room At that moment, I had a decision to make. Do I try to paint exactly what I saw in front of me or do I take the color beyond what was in front of me. A decision was made to carry that color into a parallel reality. That was, for me, the beginning of my own abstract painting.