Colleen Barry NYC Artist
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Process for “LIGHT MY SKY” 2023
🕑 Added 2025-09-09 15:44:01 +0000 UTCI 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.
Comments
Ania Dabrowska
Also, it would be amazing to know which books/artists you use there as reference.
Ania Dabrowska
I’m so lucky to have a print of this painting. It makes me happy every time I look at it. Beautiful work, thank you Colleen 🙏🏻😊😊
Nobuko Carmichael
Hi Colleen, thanks for the great post—always so informative. I was wondering if the background value is chosen to match a main value in the subject. In a mid-value painting, for example, should the background match the overall form light? And is the idea to then slowly build up the halftones and nuances of light on top of that base?
