BARBARA LANGMAID
My work is an expression of a personal life, my life. For some years the vocabulary I used consisted of layered and juxtaposed images, voices that were drawn from dreams and the subconscious (boats, water, figures). Over a period of time my work became compressed, cut and pared down, reduced to forms that echo each other: irons, doors, boats, vessels, water, swimmers…
Since immigrating to Canada from the U.S. in 1992, and coming to this part
of the world, an end-of-the-road kind of coastal village, I have been taken
by the landscape. Nearly struck dumb. I am a newcomer to this land, and see
it with the eye of an outsider but also as a believer. If you travel a few
miles up the coast you will know you are at the edge and sense the ghosts that
are there and understand perhaps a different kind of antiquity. There are silences
and spaces between the actions and notions of a human life that I have never
before encountered and I seek to embody these qualities in my painting; the
mercury-like liquid body of water, islands buoyant, solitary, independent of
opinions; the light in the afternoon when it is golden and luminescent that
seems to deepen and make fuller every thing it touches….
Born in California, I bring the pink-bricked walls of suburbia, Hollywood,
the orange and avocado groves, the colors of the south and nearby Mexico as
well as my passion for literature and narrative to this newfound landscape – it
informs my work, my life and the way I navigate through it all.