Colleen Barry NYC Artist

Process for “LIGHT MY SKY” 2023

Added 2025-09-09 15:44:01 +0000 UTC

I felt it was appropriate, as I fired up a Substack this morning about women, self-portraiture, narcissism in our culture, and what it means to paint the other. While searching for depictions of some of my favorite mother images from early 20th-century photographs of Indigenous women with their children, I stumbled upon studies I had made for a large painting entitled Light My Sky.

I created this work for a group show at the New York gallery Fredericks & Freiser. It began as small studies and grew into a large canvas, 60 x 55 inches. My process does follow a kind of linear path, though not always in a rigid way. I usually begin with a photograph source, in this case of me and my child, but the photo is always rough, just a baseline. From there, I have to pull color and imagination together to make it into an actual painting. I never want it to be an anecdotal copy of the photograph. The goal is transformation, expansion, something larger than the source.

For Light My Sky, I started with a 10 x 10 inch color sketch. I photographed that sketch and brought it into Procreate, overlaying it with a drawing I had made. Then I redrew it digitally with a stylus before enlarging it to 60 x 55 inches and transferring it. I don’t think I did much of an underpainting on this one; instead, I went straight in with color in a single, bold pass, with just some retouching at the end.