I am an artist who earned a living as a social worker for 35 years before settling in Brunswick and turning to art full time. My husband, a biologist, taught me to camp, to hike, and to love the Maine woods. For many years, we explored bogs and marshes. Once home, he would make notes about what he saw; I would sketch and draw.
I continued to draw birds and plants every night well into the wee hours of the morning, and I loved it! I drew until I was comfortable enough to use pen and ink. Most nights, I spent long hours on the painting and drawings where I just got lost in the work.
I also work in clay, collage, fabric and assemblage.
As a young child, I was always collecting things. For a time, my father owned a salvage company, and my mother and I were always pulling treasures out to take home: machinery, comic books, sterling, and the occasional ice cream scoop.
Assemblage makes use of salvage that has been altered and refit to form a new idea—a sculptural one. Materials are used to express and to communicate. The work requires the skills and techniques employed by the painter, draftsman, woodworker, printmaker, fiber artist and metal worker. Assemblage is often three-dimensional in form, novel in its conception, and humorous in its delivery.
It is also a statement of the times: sardonic, symbolic, politic and poetic.
I’m often asked how I can work in many media simultaneously. Working in this way stimulates me and makes me realize how much transfer there is from one work to another. Whether manipulating paper, paint, wood or metal, my works begin to speak to one another and to tell a story of a journey that is still in progress.
As one example: In the piece “Jar Project,” I placed Einstein in a bottle with dice, pick-up sticks, and his famous formula: E Equals M C Squared.
While making this piece, I realized that Einstein’s theory of relativity came as a result of “play.” He permitted himself the luxury of playing with his materials to come up with a solution. Our work is similar in that both involve play; both are absorbing and boundless; and both lead us to find solutions that we had not foreseen and are amazed that we ever complete.
—author, Barbara Bean; photos by Christine Macchi