Dialogue in Light: Sharon Barr and Julie Himel

Drawing from the well of the spiritual and guided by process-based intuition, both Sharon Barr and Julie Himel’s artistic practices are rooted in their bodily and metaphysical experience of the natural world. Their painted imagery manifests in varying degrees of abstraction, between them examining a wide range of formal possibilities. As it is in art and nature, light is their common focus, declared in pigment as the joyous movement of chromatic energy.

Utilizing the expressive vocabulary of painting, both Himel and Barr explore its sensuous qualities in thick impasto, dripping paint and tactile brushwork. Juicy and bright pops of colour, painted in high contrast, serve to emphasize the immediacy of colour and its palpable effect on the viewer. Presented together in this show, their work forms a dialogue of psychic intensity bursting from the painted surfaces, conveying the ecstatic vitality of nature and offering a personal ode to its sublime complexity and beauty.