Françoise Barnes

get to know Françoise Barnes

Francoise Barnes’s titles give the viewer a quick point of entry to her abstract, mixed-media paintings on canvas, panel, or paper. Barnes is inspired by bits of nature that she collects and keeps in her studio including leaves, twigs, shells, seeds, rocks, feathers, insects, egg shells, etc. From these minuscule patterns and textural details, she zooms out her focus and begins to work the canvas in broad strokes of color and shape, a process she describes somewhere between a dance and combative exchange of blows between artist and artwork.

Barnes, born and raised in France, has been a painter and drawer from an early age and studied drawing at Ohio University after moving to the United States.