8 Drawings by Barbara Grossman

I was interested in learning some new language to talk about what is so captivating about Charity Baker’s drawings and paintings. Charity gave me a list of her teachers, Barbara Grossman was one of them.

Barbara Grossman’s artworks are impressionistic, abstracted, full of color and pattern. Instead of drawing with focal points and perspective, she describes space in a more abstract or impressionist way. In these works, you’ll see that Grossman creates interest by leading us through the composition via pathways and a variety of marks that maintain their intensity all the way through and to the edge of the composition. Pathways to the edge of the rectangle can function as a powerful tool to hold us in a drawing and painting; tools that in the process of trying to render the figure, I often neglect. I frequently emerge from a drawing session with a drawing of a face or figure, without the impact of a full composition. This is most often a mistake of a desire to get it “right” and hyper-focus on the features of the face and form. It’s something I am working diligently to change, especially now that I’m seeing the student works that implement the strength of these tools, and notice how impactful they are.

Barbara Grossman studied art and music at Yale, and in the drawings below you’ll see making music as a theme. In these artworks that describe both the experience of making music and the experience of making art, notice how the shapes, marks, and pathways hold us in the frame, and lead us around the composition, continuously giving us something new to discover in the work.