'Imminent,' Oil on Canvas Mounted onto Aluminum Composite Material, by Marc Barker
This oil on canvas by Marc Barker features turbulent clouds over a body of water in monotones of black, white and grey. The painting is mounted to Aluminum Composite Material (ACM) and framed. This emotion filled painting is from Barker's series of CloudScapes and grew out of his background education in limnology and his frequent ventures into, and his love of, cave exploring. His art has organically grown out of his reverence of nature and his place within it.
"My work transforms my love of nature, the mystery and caving memories into psychologically contemplative subjects including shadow figures, cloudscapes and asterisms. I paint these grisaille oil drawings on highly textured canvas, paper and panel in contemporary techniques with vintage results. Choreographed brushwork suggests impermanence and transformation, while the heavy texturing simulates the atmospheric energy that charges the work to connect with viewers on an emotional level." About his Cloudscapes series he writes, "Observing clouds is one of my instant and personal connections to the timeless, the infinite. And with veils of paint, I invent cloudscapes in oil grisaille where I try to suggest that sublime feeling. Their connection to water and to waves is a flowing quality of the transformative energy that these etheric forms have to not only attract, but to convert into liquid. I use this cinematic quality literally when I work, because I feel I am complete with a piece when the whole mass of energy moves, swells and flows on the paper or canvas. That flow moves me, like when I am motionless, emotionally arrested, and tearfully full of wonder at prismatic sunsets, a sky-filled spring day, or sighting an impermanent, single, small cloud on a hot August afternoon." -- Marc Barker
Marc Barker has over 35 years experience in the arts and over 25 years experience teaching and producing in the field of interactive media. He managed Paseo Intaglio Printers in the late 1980s and continued into the 90s with editioning and contract printing for local and national artists. He was the guest juror for the 2009 Paseo Festival of the Arts, and in 2019 for the Goddard Center 47th Annual Competition. Marc Barker had an exhibit in the State Capitol of Oklahoma’s East Gallery in 2008 with one of his paintings chosen for the Oklahoma State Art Collection at the State Capitol.
