THE SIT DOWN
17: RACHEL BARLOW
She graduated into a marketing job in London and stopped painting almost entirely. It took about a year for her to realise how much she'd relied on it without noticing. It turned out painting hadn't been a hobby, but rather an outlet. A realisation that made her drop out and move home to begin rebuilding a portfolio. She applied to art history courses first, and added the MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art almost as an afterthought — a long shot that came back.
The RCA gave her what her undergraduate degree, disrupted by the pandemic, hadn't: a room full of people. Although she put a lot of pressure on herself, she describes finding the environment there supportive and invigorating.
Her work is about time, and everything that arrives with it: grief, memory, nostalgia, and the movement of a landscape that never holds still. Art, as she puts it, is a record of time — sometimes fast and vicious, sometimes slow and repetitive and lonely. The natural world is her way into that, since it not only withstands the passing of time but seems to welcome it. She returns often to places familiar to her family, spread across Siberia, Germany, and England. But she doesn't hold herself to the real. Fictional landscapes emerge just as readily from the branches of a tree in the park, shadows on a pavement, the pattern of a cobweb.
Her literary background surfaces in how she describes the work: a kind of language-making, in which abstraction, expressionism and representation can operate together to encode or extrapolate a subject. She wants to push that language as far in as many directions as it will go. Part of that is leaving the process visible — loose brushwork, and minute gesture. Each painting is a record of its own making, spontaneous where it wants to be and deliberate where it needs to be, and different again depending on who is standing in front of it.
A residency in Wales with the artist Noelle Griffiths, in a studio at the top of a wooded hill, produced a body of work on trees. Given it was just after winter, the landscape to which she arrived was a dynamic wreckage. That dynamism carried into what came next. She has been thinking about dance since: partly the wind and the movement, partly the way she draws, loose and free, painting as a kind of choreography. A visit to Portmeirion, the Italianate resort village designed by Clough Williams-Ellis, added a stranger note — a glistening artificiality, a sense of manufactured joy — and the circus and the jester figure have started to appear on the horizon of the work.
She works mostly in oil, on canvas when she wants looseness and on panel when she wants smoothness and refined gradients. Gesture needs scale, she says, because a small painting only lets you move your finger, where a large one lets your whole body flow. She bounces between extremes: meticulous biro drawings that take weeks, and large-scale oil paintings finished in a matter of hours. She has drawn constantly since school — margins filled, sketchbooks always to hand — and her first ever exhibition was a biro drawing.
Her first solo exhibition opens in October at Kutlesa Gallery in Switzerland, a series of paintings all made in the year since she left the RCA.
PF: Who or what has influenced your work the most?
It’s hard to pinpoint one thing. Literature and poetry have definitely played an important part, and I think the rhythms of language transpose quite naturally into a visual practice. Seeing 'Dark Strokes Hope' by Joan Snyder at the Tate was also crucial in changing the way I thought about painting and process.
PF: Walk us through your creative process?
Almost all of my paintings start as drawings, so the first step is always sketching either from life or from my imagination. I like to sketch most while doing other things, so that subconscious ideas or forms can emerge. From these initial sketches I can usually tell what will work as a painted composition, but of course the process of putting brush to canvas always transforms the work into something else.
PF: What do you want people to feel or take away from your art?
I would love for my art to allow a moment of pause, or a moment of reflection. Really, though, what people take from my work is not for me to decide; I love being surprised by how differently people can experience the same image.
PF: If you could have dinner with any artist who would it be?
If I had to narrow it down to one, it would probably be Natalia Goncharova. She was a big inspiration to me early on in my painting journey and I adore the way she flows between different subjects and mediums, especially when it comes to her set and costume designs.