Brooklyn Artist Julia Whitney Barnes: Paintings to Ceramics to Murals
By Mike Weiss
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
WILLIAMSBURG — At the Front Room gallery in Williamsburg is a 5-foot-tall painting, on which a cool muted blue moves like a stream through an abstract landscape of blazing orange-reds. Within this landscape, the natural forms of clouds and trees contrast with the fractured struts of a tree house. It is a confluence of tensions, a signpost in a colorful twilight zone where passages of dark oblivion compete with swirling steps to a heavenly window, a small escape hatch to the freedom of an open sky.
“Treehouse (Island)” is a painting by Brooklyn artist Julia Whitney Barnes, an artist whose work ranges from studio painting to ceramics to public art. Formally trained as an oil painter, she also has earned “street cred” from her projects across the city, such as a mural along a highway in Harlem and, in 2009, her life-sized bat sculptures that hung from willow trees in Brooklyn Bridge Park.