Colleen Barry NYC Artist

“Dark Behind It Rose the Forest”

“Dark Behind a Rose the Forest” is an intimate, fiery little oil painting I made for my March 2025 exhibition at Half Gallery in New York City. Painted with transparent pigments, it captures a scene both earthy and luminous—a nude mother laughing with her baby, bathed in a glow that feels like firelight. Darkness envelopes the space around them—suggesting the forest. A canine figure rests on the mother’s shoulder, peering down at the child, sharing in the quiet wonder of the moment...

Starting on a Chromatic Wet Base

When doing an alla prima portrait sketch I would recommend working initially into a wet base layer of oil paint to create a fluid abstract design. If the base layer is wet every subsequent hue added merges with this base pigment and you can establish beautiful edge variety. This kind of wet into wet planar merging creates a unity of vision for your hues and values. But keep in mind this painting was made in two sessions. The final layer was added over the dry first layer. This painting was ma...

A “Broad to Specific” Technique Using Neutrals

I made this self portrait (14x14in) during Covid lockdown June 2020. In light of my Helen Schjerkbeck post yesterday, I am revealing my past processes of making opaque passages of a-chromatic layers in a portrait. These works had no transfer and were free handed from abstraction. The vibrant blue shirt and green background were added towards the final layer. Glazing pigments looks best if there’s a full bodied dry opaque film underlying. At one point I had made the shirt a light lavender kn...

How Helen Schjerfbeck taught me to paint portraits.

“Let us avoid executing so precisely and exactly, that our work closes the way instead of opening it, let us imply” H. Schjerfbeck c. 1916

During the 2020s I painted mostly portraits and self portraits. At the time I was looking deeply at the work of the Finnish painter Helen Schjerfbeck (1862-1946). I had known about her work since my early 20’s as there was a retrospective of her painting at the National Academy of Design in Manhattan around 2001 and I owned the catalog to that ...

Current Underpainting

Raw Umber and White Grisaille on a darker neutral ground. I plan on making one pass over this substrate. My study is here to guide me but I plan to deviate from it in a few ways. 16x20 inch wood panel.

First Form

Working on a darker neutral ground helps ensure a single pass with minimal going back and retouching. I am hatching with the paint, the feeling is similar to drawing with a pencil actually. I have a gradient scale set up on my pallet for easy form tiling. My goal is to directly break through the picture plane working from shadow to light (or from light to shadow) and work area by area.

Lyme Academy Commencement Speech

Attached is my commencement speech from Saturday’s graduation.

The Lyme Academy of Art, Old Lyme CT.

June 21st, 2025

Good Afternoon. It’s an honor and a privilege to speak to you today. I want to firstly thank Jordan and Amaya for this wonderful opportunity to share my thoughts about a subject I care deeply about: Art and Classical Art Education.

With the rise of Cultural Marxism in American universities—a long conversation we can’t fully unpack today—...

More Notes on Ébauche

Starting on a lighter warm ground helps to make the transparent scratches of the paint more apparent in the ébauche pass. Also, try using a fine pointed sable brush to hatch the paint to give it a lively disposition. Don’t over blend. I repeat: Don’t over blend your ébauche. Final layer is for blending and glazing.

A New Ébauche

Its a good idea to paint your ébauche on a warm lighter ground to play up the transparency of the paint. J. L. David and D. Ingres thought so too.

D-Girl PROCESS circa 2022

Back when I made mostly alla prima portrait sketches, I usually painted over some kind of sketchy grey under painting. Things haven’t changed much as my current underpainting techniques still vary between color ébauche and grisaille, sometimes I free hand the drawing and sometimes I transfer the drawing. This is an older work from 2022. A good friend purchased this work as I prepared for the Ride the Tiger exhibition back in 2023. It’s a portrait of my younger sister Diana. It’s 11x14 ...

Opacity “tiled like a mosaic” over Transparency

As I apply the 2nd pass overtop the ébauche, I try to “tile” it like a mosaic. The palette has to be set up just right to achieve this. Premixing gradient strings is necessary. I use sable rounds for a small work this small. It’s 9x12 inches. I will leave the gloves more transparent to juxtapose the opaque mask. When setting up my gradient scale on my palette, I try to relate it to the conceptualized gradient ark that I’m building on my painting. I work area by area.

African Painted Dog and Pentimenti

I changed this painting. These small works are meant to be ruminations of, and for, potential larger works. This means they are flexible and can change. I oil out with a makeup sponge and a mixture of 1/2 turps and 1/2 walnut oil. The painted wild dog suited this figure in contrast to the pink guardian pillars which felt too contrived.

a recent Ébauche of Grace Jones “Private Life” 1980

Techniques of the 1880’s collide here with a 1980’s aesthetic in this appropriation of Mike Mansfield’s music video “Private Life” with the iconic model Grace Jones. Not sure what the 2nd layer will bring forth but I’m liking this scrubby effect of the paint on a light yellow ground, oil on wood. This work will be exhibited this summer in NYC.

https://youtu.be/yvLn_qC7QAs?si=y7MTVQIi5...

Girl with Pink Lion 2025

Swipe to see the process on this one. Last two images are Ingres and Delacroix’s palettes. They used gradient strings rather nicely.

Raw Umber Underpainting

Working on this underpainting currently. Raw Umber and Lead White underpainting, painted on Belgium linen that I prepared with 5 layers of golden gesso, and one final layer of golden neutral 7 acrylic ground. This painting may take a while as it’s big and I want it to be really good. As I have said before, I make Raw Umber under-paintings when I want my paintings to look “form oriented”. If the painting is a more colorful work, I generally work on a lighter ground that’s warm, but if...

Jean-Francois Millet made erotic work prior to his more “moral” subject matter including workers and families.

Kenneth Clark, in his book The Romantic Rebellion, discusses Jean-François Millet’s early focus on erotic nudes and his subsequent shift to moral subject matter. Clark notes that during the first decade of his career, Millet produced “skillful pastiches of Correggio and Fragonard,” creating works that were far from mere academic exercises. These early paintings and drawings of the nude reflected Millet’s intense sensuality, aligning him with artists like Poussin and St. Augustin...

Glazing Red and Orange

Three paintings in Good Mud were made with an underpainting called a Grisaille. I glazed certain sections of the grisaille with a vibrant red orange. I could’ve only really done this with a monochrome underpainting finished with a degree of detail underneath. Not all glazing is like this, where you just put a thin veil of chromatic color over a grisaille, glazing can be more subtle than that usually. But if you paint a very graphic object in grisaille, and you prefer there to be a monochrom...

Small=Free hand Large=Transfer

Caption: “Anytime I start a painting, if it’s not a small (small paintings i generally free hand) I make a cartoon, a digital drawing, in the app called Procreate. I make a line drawing with the pen stylis. I basically just draw over a photograph. This is a medium sized work 42 x 36 1/2“ . Why you might ask do I make my cartoons not full valued? Number one: the printer ink would be too expensive and number two: if the cartoon is subtracted down to it lines again it reminds me of the...