BARBARA KOLO : OBSESSION

Film by Eric Minh Swenson.

A quiet stillness to Barbara Kolo’s work evokes a time of reflection. Inspired by natural forms and influenced by impressionist, Aboriginal, and Asian, art she developed a graceful meditative visual language, using dots or circles and lines. The paintings grow organically, with any resulting symmetry and order happening in the moment. In her “Obsession Series,” she repeatedly hand stamps ink or acrylic paint circles with different degrees of pressure, creating imperfections and variation that show the artist’s hand. Each dot or circle is then counted with tally marks that become part of the image. The total tally is the title of the work, and reflects the name of the series. On first sight, viewers are excited by the dizzying array of dots and then, the quietly meditative quality of Barbara’s work.