One Hundred Artists Have Come Together to Share the Distinctiveness of New England
100 Artists of New England
by Ashley Rooney
Barbara painting the Nasa commissioned x-43, the fastest aircraft in the world, right before takeoff.
I am an artist because it is in my nature. My mother was an artist and Head of the Design Department at Pratt Art Institute. I grew up outside New York, but my roots go back to the early 1700s in New England. I have spent much of my life painting New England. I went to Williams College (studied Art History with Lane Faison) and have a masters from Harvard. A Fulbright Scholarship to Europe and a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to Asia expanded my world. I painted my surroundings but always came back to New England to exhibit and find inspiration. I have been painting Maine for over thirty years, and my paintings of Maine and New England have been exhibited in New York and Europe, most recently in a Paris retrospective. They are included in museum collections such as The Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the White House. American embassies abroad, including Paris, Madrid, Prague, and Oslo, have also exhibited the New England paintings. As a Presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts, I am involved in the arts on a national and international level, but I continue to return to New England for inspiration.