Izzy Barber
Clay Pigeons

When I first experienced Barber’s paintings during an Artist talk of theirs, I instantly felt an immediacy to them. I felt as if they were pulling me directly into the scene, into a liminal space, and the works in this exhibition do just that too. It’s as if I’m wandering desolate deserts under a darkened, starlit sky, or I’m stumbling by the roadside, observing an artificially warm glow bathing the side of a streetlight pole which I end up leaning against, watching passersbys judge me, a weary traveler. With this series, Barber remains committed to the observation, material experimentation, and the visceral experience of painting from real life. All the while pulling real life into them. Barber’s work acts as both a reaction and an interaction, both a conversation on current issues and feelings as well as acting as an archive of those moments as seen through her own eyes. The new body of work in the exhibit titled Clay Pigeons includes paintings the artist made during three, month-long, cross-country road trips taken in 2025 and 2026. The pieces are simultaneously dramatic, cinematic, and stoic, as the paintings pull me into them, as if I was standing alongside Barber in real time. 

Working within the extremities of plein-air painting, such as the weather, traveling conditions, or the immediacy of the scene before her, Barber places herself in unfamiliar, and at times, charged environments. Placing herself in locations within the West, especially in locations that involve the border, expansive highways, or places of an in between, she must contend with various challenges and conditions that make the creation of the paintings even more urgent and immediate. The direct experience of the scenes before her and the inherent limitations of her distinctive practice shape each piece in its own way. While on scene, she must be swift and agile to chronicle a moment that is placed before her. That moment may be fleeting, and she may only have moments to capture it to memory in order to later put it to the canvas. By doing this, her resulting paintings unearth the latent tensions stretching across the empty highways, border walls, and the vast deserts of the U.S. By taking us into these places of transition, places full of  movement, suspense, and uncertainty, Barber turns us into a sort of traveller. A traveler who is experiencing other sides to the United States, and by capturing these moments onto canvas, Barber slows down the tumultuous times we find ourselves within today. 

I really enjoy the intricacies of Barber’s paintings. The smallest brushstrokes carry the most weight. Motivated by a relentless drive for exploration, Barber paints with the heightened visual clarity and charged excitement that comes from her physical presence with her subject matter sitting right in front of her. Direct observation is the foundation. She works on-site in public spaces, or in a car traveling to the next destination - where she captures compositions swiftly, painting wet on wet so as not to lose the motions of the moment. This swiftness and quick observation infuses her paintings with a luminous quality often with vivid flashes of color emerging from a deeper, darkened background. Loose, gestural brushwork and the sensitive capturing of softened edges of light and dark combine with moments of sharp structure that become illuminated by light, such as the railroad in the piece titled Sulphur Springs, TX. Barber’s aim for the work is never precise replication of the scene before her; but rather to create paintings that capture and distill the full sensory experience of a place as she feels it, sees it, and records it. The energy of a place’s afterhours routine, the movement of the people, or the urgency of a place’s conflicts all appear before us. 

Barber’s works are current, and out of a need to physically confront our current tumultuous national reality, Barber went west, where the highways were expansive, the deserts were deep, and the streets gritty and dark. Barber’s choice of light which is often small, subtle, or warm radiating glows that merely bounce off the edges of wires, street poles, or metal train tracks and only uncover small details that Barber lets permeate through her painted strokes. The intimately scaled paintings that emerged from her travels embody that process of first-hand observation and when seen together, they hold a range of contradictions and complexities that characterize our era. Clear blue skies in Ajo, Arizona are pierced by insistent vertical stripes of the US-Mexico border wall. Quiet nights in rural towns of Cedarville, California and Bassett, Nebraska are placed in juxtaposition with paintings of armed National Guard on the streets of Washington, D.C. Such as the piece title ERO El Paso Camp East Montana, Day, where Barber’s strokes, as swift and economical as they are, cut right through the contradictions and are bouncing between every location she puts before us, and each location shares the same energy, whether she captures it in the daytime or the night.