What inspired you to start painting?
I was working as an art therapist for a long time. During breaks from work, I started to do some painting myself. When I moved back to Holland, I wanted to meet new people and I signed up for the Zaterdag Ateliers in 2005. It’s an open studio setting on Saturdays that’s been going strong for 40 years. Under the subtle guidance of Jan Willem Post, the artist responsible for the painting department there, I developed my own style. I have been painting and drawing my whole life, yet it hadn’t occurred to me to do abstract painting. The basis of it is my training in art therapy.
How would you define the discipline of art therapy and your background with this field of study?
Art therapy is a form of psychotherapy which works with images created by the patient in spontaneous art forms. Famous analysts like C.G. Jung have described the way the unconscious uses symbols to communicate, for instance when people dream. After having worked in private practice in post-Reichian therapy for seven years, I did a post-graduate training in art therapy in Edinburgh. The art work I did in those years was more private – my own communication with dreams and symbols. I then worked in Switzerland for ten years in psychiatry. It wasn’t really until I‘d moved back to Holland that I really began to paint for the sake of painting.
So, you began to view your work more personally as an artist, rather than as an art therapist?
Yes. I was always encouraged to create art. My mom sent me to painting and drawing classes when I was nine. The teacher loved my work, but the other kids didn’t, so I adapted to fit in. Maybe, deep in my heart, I always wanted to be an artist. Yet, growing up in a practical family with many stories of the Second World War, it didn’t occur to me that you could earn a living that way. When I was 18, I became a journalist, with big ideas of changing the world. Then, in 1981 I went to Scotland, did odd jobs, and just enjoyed being in nature. Those experiences come back in the paintings – the love of Scotland. I have never been that attached to opinions about my painting and drawing. It was so natural. I can enjoy looking at my own paintings as much as someone who had not painted them would – as if they are something that comes through me rather than something I planned to do.
Why do you think you have this detachment?
I’m attached to what they are, but not to what I did. I think it’s because it’s so effortless for me. It’s something I’ve always had without having to work for it – drawing or looking at things. It’s probably such a deep part of me, the intensity of looking at or experiencing atmospheres that I tend not to think about it. In some ways, the paintings are quite impersonal. There are rarely people in them nor are they an expression of turbulent emotions. They’re fragments of things I’ve looked at and loved – the light on things, landscapes. They also encompass the speed of travelling by train or car and the image that remains on your closed eyelids before going to sleep. Or the worlds in your sleep that remain when you open them again...
How would you describe your artwork to those who view it?
It’s really basic. I would say that it’s colorful and that I work with light and shadow. I would think that’s what most painters do, but some artists work more strongly with form, lines, and feelings.
I definitely see a lot of light in your work. It takes me to this very peaceful, reflective place. I can just stare at them for hours, just drifting off in my thoughts.
That’s interesting because in a way that’s what I have done. I have stared at these places, either outside myself or inside myself because some of it comes from inside, for a very long time. That’s how another person may then pick up on that feeling. The biggest compliment I’ve ever received came from my mother. She said that she imagines that when she dies she’d go to the kind of places she sees in my paintings.
That’s a wonderful compliment from your mother. What is your technique when constructing your pieces?
I create layers and layers of paint. I generate the paintings on canvas. Sometimes, I have white on one side of the brush, black on the other and another color in the middle. I often mix on the canvas itself. I might get what I think is an ugly color, but it’s really the negative of the color that’s going to come out later. Sometimes, I have three canvases up at once if I have a lot of energy. Otherwise, you can work too long on one painting. I spend a long time just looking and drinking coffee, until I know what to do next. That’s the most difficult part. I’ve learned sometimes you have to stop at the point of greatest tension.
That’s very true. You don’t want to over think the process. What are some of your favorite works and why?
Door and Doorway tend to be my favorites because I don’t think I could do them again. The light is great. They are like windows and doorways that you walk past at night. There is this longing – the stroke of light underneath the door. You are out in the dark and you want to go inside.
Do those doors remind you of returning to familiar places?
Yes, I’ve lived in three different countries so I’m always homesick for one of those places – for friends that are there and sights that I’ve seen. Maybe that’s what people pick up from the paintings - a kind of longing for home.
Theresa Barbaro
