THE ART OF CHANTAL BARNES IN DREAM CATCHER MAGAZINE, EXTRAPOLATED BY GREG MCGEE

Greg McGee is Art Advisor for international poetry magazine Dream Catcher

There is a misconception that Abstract Painting in its composition floats free of concrete representation. Subject matter? Colour scheme? Mark making? Throw them up in the air, the presumption goes, and let them land where they may. Since the Industrial Revolution, Freud, and Photography, when populations boomed and the subconscious floated up as a dominant conduit, Modern Art has been almost obliged to interpret the world in whatever way the artist wants.

This has naturally extended to Poetry. e.e. cummings, one of the 20th century’s leading poets, gives us anyone lived in a pretty how town, where the title of the poem is its first line and provides us with an aesthetically pleasing enigma. Emily Dickinson’s ‘The brain is wider than the sky’ is instantly absurd. The physical brain is not wider than the sky, nor, as she asserts later, is it ‘deeper than the sea’. Her play with concepts, however, the physicality of the brain and the abstract notion of the mind, provides a timely portal in our discussion of this issue’s painter, Chantal Barnes. 

Barnes’ paintings are based on the building blocks of concrete representation. Her seascapes have languid tides and her landscapes have foregrounds and iridescent horizons. They are also shot through with elements of Abstract Art. In her hands, skies pullulate and colours throb as if seen for the first time. For Contemporary Painters, few inspirational visual touchstones inculcate the mixing of colours and the making of marks than the relentless crests of breaking waves, and it is this, in her latest collection, Chantal Barnes concurs with Emily Dickinson. The mind is indeed wider than the sky and deeper than the sea: it is the mind which can endow, through personal Abstract flourishes, new ways of looking at that which we may have been taking for granted for too long. Nature not only heals, it galvanises. At a time when we have been fragmented, made afraid, and even a walk on a beach has been coldly enumerated (drone footage of lone dog walkers on beaches being castigated by tannoys brings back bad memories), the horizon, and its promise of light amidst elemental darkness, is perhaps the crucial message Chantal Barnes in her paintings imparts.

For more Chantal Barnes art, visit our online store: https://accordingtomcgee.com/collections/chantal-barnes

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