Barbara Mueller

 

For many years, organic forms in varying degrees of abstraction have been the major components of the imagery in my painting and drawing. My very early work was almost exclusively involved with the human figure. Form and line abstracted from this source continued to be an integral part of my work. Other sources have been plant forms and land, water, and cloud relationships. In these, the transparent areas of paint coupled with the carefully defined edges produce a sense of flowing layers moving through space, evoking rather than describing phenomena of nature to which the viewer can relate.

 

Drawing has always been the one constant in my life as an artist and both the major and favorite portion of what I taught for a period of over thirty years. Work grew out of the excitement I felt about the direct and unencumbered nature of the drawing process itself. Form in both drawing and painting suggest plains, stratification of rocks, horizon-sky relationships and other of some kind of geographical interior. I think of these as the more profound dream-like images of the mind’s interior and of those concerns both social and psychological which occupy so much of our thoughts and feelings. These images can suggest not only the flow of form and energy through space and time, but also implicit confinements, boundaries, and stresses. Forms are locked together under tension, separated but joined by energetic force, or straining apart.

 

In my painting, drawing is a major and visible factor. The airbrushed works with water color sprayed around stencils create very defined edges and thus the linear element is strong. Later gouache paintings also exhibit a definite sense of line.

 

Through all the years, I have returned to the human body and the natural plant and land forms for inspiration.

 

 

Copyright Barbara Mueller, all rights reserved