Escape

Inspiration

Outer noticings and inner musings converge and become the visual manifestation of my response to being a deeply sentient and reflective person. My painting and printmaking background, coupled with developing over 25 different studio courses during my college teaching career, allows me to reach for an array of media and materials, both traditional and experimental, that best suits the spirit of the emerging work. This painting entitled “Escape” includes charcoal, water-based paints and inks, and pastel. Whether responding to the complexities of our natural world, or those inside ourselves and others, all is stored and cultivated in my artist’s heart long enough to emerge as time compressions and pure outpourings of my creative sensibilities. The essential component of my process is to remain open, honest, and vulnerable while staying alert and responsive to the evolving formal and emotional aspects of the work. Marks and strokes make their way out and into my work in the most honest creative moment I can make possible while keeping my balance over the edge of knowing and not knowing. That balancing requires both discipline and risk-taking and is fueled by the energy and excitement of the process itself.

Meet the Artist

Barbara Burgess Maier exhibits her work and is in private collections in this country and abroad. Her undergraduate work both at Endicott College and Skidmore college allowed her to explore a range of media from clay to steel, oil to water based media, woodcuts, etching, lithography to monotype. This creative toolbox informs her work and her working process. Always able to choose the medium and material that aligns with the image-making she pursues. Her visual background and teaching priority includes the ability to draw representationally from life and curiosity about varied and unfamiliar things, believing that visual discipline allows one the freedom to work abstractly by choice, not necessity, and that openness to new ideas, disciplines, and cultures enriches one’s sensibilities.

Her art offers a compression of time, able to be revealed by the viewer through their own visual journey with the work. Rather than trapping a particular scene or subject in time, she seeks to set it free. Not unlike a poet as they fit words together in revelatory or explosive ways, she seeks to fit her marks, strokes, shapes, values, and colors in similar ways but whose meanings transcend specific definition.

Bromfield Gallery
450 Harrison Ave
Boston, MA 02118
www.bromfieldgallery.com.

Barbara Burgess Maier
(978) 697-1261
www.burgessmaier.net