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On March 2, PaintingsDIRECT visited Barbara Coleman at her Soho studio in New York City to talk about her work.

PD: You work on a big scale. I see the paintings on the site here in your studio, and many even larger works stacked over there. There are no small paintings or studies around. Have you always worked on such a large scale?
Barbara Coleman: Oh no, there are no studies. Every work is done right on the canvas. It’s a spontaneous thing. They’re done on primed canvas. Sometimes they don’t work, and they get ripped off the stretcher and I start again because I want something really fresh. I don’t want anything overworked, and the work has to have that feeling as if it just appeared, and that’s not easy to get.

Moonlight
(1999)

PD: So there are no studies at all. Do you draw or ever work on paper?
BC: I have maybe 500 works on paper. But that’s a thing in itself. They’re related to the paintings, but I don’t take from one to the other, especially since the act itself is sort of religious….My teacher was Rothko. He died in’67 or ‘69 and he had just seen my work before he died. It traumatized me tremendously. I couldn’t paint or go to school for a long time. I had to stop going to Hunter…I was just very upset. I knew him in the last years, and he liked my work.

PD: You are from NY and you’ve been painting here consistently for over 30 years. Do you feel that anything in the work has to do with having worked here for so long?
BC: Oh, yes, definitely. The vertical bands of color…it’s the buildings. I would be doing horizontals if I was any place else but NY.

Simple and Strong
(1996)

Interview continued...
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