Colleen Barry NYC Artist

Gradients and Grisaille

The Grisaille process begins with value tiling on the palette, placing down discrete blocks of tone from a prepared value scale. These tiles serve as structural anchors, preventing the painting from becoming vague in its early stages. Just as important is the immediate breaking through of the picture plane: the values are arranged not as a flat design but as patches of light and shadow that create depth from the very beginning. Once placed, these value tiles are stitched together with the bru...

More on Oil Transfer

I don’t use a projector when I make my transfers. My go-to method is the oil transfer, where I print out cartoons, sometimes small, sometimes very large, and coat the back with oil paint before transferring them. For large works, the paper often has to be cut into sections since a single sheet won’t fit through a standard printer, so I puzzle the fragments together. For years I would print at Kinko’s from a USB drive, but recently my husband, Will, invested in a large-format printer. No...

Process for “LIGHT MY SKY” 2023

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. I...

Making an Oil Transfer

The Oil Transfer: Artists have long used transfer methods to move drawings onto their working surface, whether in fresco, where cartoons were pounced or pressed, or on canvas, where variations of tracing and rubbing were common. Every painter has their own approach. In this case, I’m using an oil transfer: I take my cartoon or photograph, coat the back with a thin layer of oil paint (here, ivory black), then place it against the panel and retrace my contours with a stylus o...

Art Review: 3 Female Voices 9-5-25

After two days of seeing shows across the city, I was struck by how relieved I felt whenever I encountered female made painting that hadn’t absorbed Francis Bacon’s shadow. His legacy of arbitrary chaos rarely opens toward light, it almost always drags downward into something destructive.

At the Ambera Wellmann’s Hauser and Wirth debut exhibition, I stood before a canvas almost 300 inches long: creepy, yes, but formally alive, keeping the eye darting across its surface. I...

Notes on an Ébauche

The Ébauche - literally “first attempt” in French - is the initial painted layer. When you begin, I recommend using a small round brush; I often use a Rosemary sable round. I like to hatch with the paint almost as if I’m drawing, laying in the shadows with a base shadow value and then gradually creeping up into the mid-tones- kept relatively neutral-and finally hatching into the lighter areas.

This first pass should feel connected to drawing. The paint is meant to remain transpar...

Stages of a Portrait circa 2019

Back in 2019, I was painting a lot of portraits, and this commission came out of that period. At the time, I was looking closely at late 19th-century painters—Abbott Thayer and John Singer Sargent in particular. My process was essentially two layers: first, I laid down an opaque, desaturated underpainting, almost like a dead-color stage, but not a formal grissaille. Once that dried, I repainted the portrait with richer saturation and soft transitions, leaning toward a Sargent-like sfumato. ...

Part 2: Shellacing Paper

Proportion: 1 Part Shellac Flakes / 6 parts Denatured Alcohol

Apply: Window Shade the shellac mixture one area at a time, left to right or reverse

Why Shellac Paper? It makes the paper more durable, its enriches the tones of the graphite giving it a beautiful depth. The paper feels less “cottony” and more wet feeling, it hardens the paper from the resin in the shellac. You can also use more multi media if you want and the pape...

The Andy Warhol Effect

A little excerpt from my Love Dogs painting video documented in 2023 and released in March, 2024. I documented the entire process of making a figure painting from the original doodle, the canvas prep, the underpainting, to the final finish and presentation at Art Brussels Contemporary Art Fair, 2023. It’s currently available on my website.

The Importance of Pre-Mixing

On an August afternoon, a little description about the importance of pre- mixing. Make it a ritual.

Don’t chase : Summon / 6 Essential Rules for Building a Career in Art

1. Don’t chase - summon.

Desperation has a scent, and dealers can smell it. Instead of running after opportunities, calmly go about your work. Make paintings that hold their ground and understand the landscape you’re operating in. Draw the right people into your orbit. Chasing never works—there’s a natural law that says: if I’m being pursued, I’ll keep running. So stop in your tracks, turn onto your own path, and walk it with purpose. This is an advance and ...

On Returning to Drawing…..

I’ve recently returned to drawing after a seven year sabbatical, and here are some thoughts.

Drawing is a beast you feed, but it is never satisfied. It’s like the gym, you never leave thinking, that was my best workout, i’ve mastered it. Instead, it’s always improvement without arrival. Drawing works the same way. You’ll never be finished, never truly satisfied.

For me, drawing has always been less about product and simply more about brain exercise. About ten y...

Toning Paper : Part 1

Paper: Arches Water color paper 140 lb, hot press.

Tone: Sennelier Ink Walnut Stain mix with Water (2 tbs water, 2 or 3 syringes of ink) per piece.

Apply: Window shade the ink mixture onto the paper working left to right, do not start in the middle of the paper.

Notes: I use the back of the paper for more texture, (i hate drawing on smooth paper) Apply two coats of color if needed. You can even adju...

A new Ébauche: Tronie/Janus

For this new 11 x 14 panel, I’m layering a modern tronie of a popstar over the form of an ancient Janus bust. Janus is a Roman god, (he doesn’t have a Greek counterpart), and is always shown with two faces. He looks both backward and forward, keeper of thresholds, patron of beginnings and endings, presiding over every passage of time. The month of January takes its name from him.

The Romans placed Janus at their gates and doorways, because he symbolized both protection and transitio...

Speaking Through the Ground

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about ground color—and how the ground collaborates with the layers that come after it. It’s simple in my mind: if my ground is cool, I put a warm layer on top; if my ground is warm, I go with a cooler sub-layer.

When I’m doing studies, I suggest to any painter: make oil sketches freehand. Don’t transfer a drawing for these smaller works. The paint will surprise you—you want that spontaneity and unpredictability. Let the drawing be a lit...

Glazing Ears / African Painted Dog - 2025

I’m applying the second pass on this African wild dog (also known as the painted dog). The underpainting—done in a mix of raw umber, white, and yellow—is now completely dry. My job at this stage is to create a thin film of color over it, working with opaque passages of Yellow Ochre, Indian yellow and Van Dyke brown. In the ears, I first glazed a warmth of transparent oxide red, then painted into it with lighter and darker pigments to build the texture of the fur.

Approaches to Underpainting

Underpainting is the foundational stage of a painting, setting up structure, value, and harmony before the final layers of color are applied. Throughout history, artists have developed a variety of approaches, each with its own character and purpose. Below are four key methods, with examples of their historical use: (Quick disclaimer: I never use the wipe out method)

1. The Grisaille

The grisaille is a monochrome underpainting executed in tones of black, ...

Girl with Wild Dogs / 2025

(Wait till the end to see my palette) My neutral ground is a bit darker on this one. A value 4.5. I did this intentionally so that my single layer of paint sits easier and allows for one pass. At the very end I may glaze a bit but this is a "one pass painting". Again, I reiterate that lighter grounds require more covering, ie an ebauche and middle grounds are more forgiving of one pass.

I’ve Returned to Drawing

So I’ve Returned to Drawing….

After what I’d call a seven-year sabbatical from making formal drawings, drawings for their own sake, I’m returning to that language again. Of course, I’ve never truly stopped drawing. Every painting begins with it; it’s inevitable. But the deliberate act of making a Drawing as a Drawing, for no other reason than to pursue the discipline itself, is something I haven’t fully engaged with in roughly six years.

As a teacher at the Grand Cen...

My Studio Library

I really believe books, and the images in them, have a kind of quiet power for an artist. When I’m working on a painting, there’s usually a specific idea in my mind—often shaped by certain artists I’ve been looking at. Books carry an aura, and I think that aura seeps into the work in ways we don’t even notice. One of the habits I’ve established is keeping the books that I need open on the floor to be sure this transfer is successful.

-Stephen Ellcock ~ ALL GOOD THINGS~ 2...