A Friendly Ghost

source: hannahbarnesart

Hannah Barnes was born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. She lives and works in Muncie Indiana. Her paintings and drawings explore problems of structure and fragmentation, surface and depth, and the rejection of overt meaning in images. Her work has appeared nationally in such places as the Richmond Museum of Art (IN), the Shore Institute for Contemporary Art (NJ), 37A gallery (ME), Ohio State University galleries (OH), Earlham College (IN), Arthouse at the Jones Center (TX), and Brooklyn’s Work Gallery (NY). She recently completed a residency at the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation in Cranberry Isles, Maine. She is an assistant professor of painting at Ball State University.
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source: enidlawsongallery

Hannah Barnes was born in Exeter in 1966. Following an Art Foundation course at Exeter School of Art, she successfully completed a degree in Fine Art at Gloucestershire College of Art and Technology (now Gloucestershire University). After her degree, Hannah moved to France and worked as a technical translator (for Lafarge) but she managed to continue with her art work and was able to take part in both group exhibitions in France and solo shows in Périgueux, Lyon.
In 2004 Hannah returned to the UK, she completed a second degree in French at King’s College, London and now paints full time in her studio in South London.
Instead of the traditional sketchbook, Hannah produces sketches with a stylus on her Sony Reader, a present from husband Les that goes everywhere with her. Her favourites are then printed out and worked up into a unique painting using a mixture of inks, watercolour and crayon.
In the main, Hannah’s paintings celebrate the female face and she is particularly intrigued by what it is that makes a face stand out from the crowd of faces we see all the time. She asks herself “what is it that makes a face, or its representation, memorable if not iconic”. Her paintings are compelling and one finds oneself thinking of them long after they are out of one’s field of vision.
Most recently, Hannah had a painting included in the Society of Women Artists’ Annual Exhibition, The Mall Galleries, The Mall, London.