“My work is about the universal forces that envelop and shape our existence and give rise to our cultural awareness. I wish to engage you in this continual flow of energy through time and space that gifts us with the privilege of life. ”

For over thirty years, the American artist Barbara Van Arnam has worked with a variety of materials to create artworks that engage viewers with the wonder of Nature and the universal truths expressed in our shared cultural Myths. Van Arnam lived her childhood in a kaleidoscope of worlds, as she moved regularly, changing schools, acquaintances and neighborhoods the way most of us change clothes. Her relationship with the natural things like lizards, frogs, birds and all the other creatures that inhabit the earth on and under the spreading canopy of trees, formed the basis for her knowledge of our world. These subtle yet powerful forces were there in every state and every country to which her father’s new Air Force assignment brought the family.

She has said that her refuge as a young girl was found in a quiet place, where she could be utterly absorbed in a book, exploring and living a piece of our cultural heritage. The constant change of locale and the gift of hours spent alone reading molded her use of color and materials as expressed in the alla prima technique that she employs. Sculptor and arts writer Polly Victor, in Lineonline, writes of one exhibition, “Barbara Van Arnam’s paintings, in Gallery 25, show iconic subjects from the natural world, but something important is going on. This painter’s real passion is color – moving color. Objects float on unending motions of glossy color fields. The paintings seem to have come from a barnful of paint tubes, which were busy hybridizing, reproducing themselves in glistening new shades. Turned loose, the paints merge like wind on washed grasses.”