A small selection of drawings created by Barb Brown will be showcased at the South Cariboo Business Centre starting on Feb. 14.
“My husband is a musician and we have a tight little group here who plays music. I don’t play at all and I decided if I wanted to be part of that energy that I would just create some art from drawing them and it’s just for my pleasure,” said Brown.
She said the best part of drawing the musicians was getting lost in the moment.
The drawings are not posed but drawn as the artists play.
“Drawing from life is like trying to figure out a puzzle. When doing work from the human figure we all know what that particular person looks like, so it’s a challenge to be accurate, yet play with spontaneity,” said Brown.
Brown first started creating art roughly ten years ago by going to a life drawing workshop in Wells with no history of drawing or other art mediums. The experience, according to her, is the basis of all her work and the drawing of musicians is just an offshoot of that.
Brown will also be displaying encaustic pieces. Encaustic paintings are a hot wax painting and colour pigments applied to a surface and then a brush is used to change the shape of the paint as the wax cools. Brown’s encaustics are usually barn animals.
“We have a barnyard flock of chickens and ducks so the encaustic will be pictures I have taken and put into art,” she said.
She starts by taking a picture, making a stencil and uses spackling paste, and then paints over it with the hot wax.
“A lot of it is creating arts for my own space. I got a modest collection of local art, B.C. art, significant art and then I just augment it with my own stuff,” said Brown, who doesn’t sell or show off her work very often, other than the odd Facebook post.
According to Brown, the most challenging part of being an artist is realizing the art she produces is not a reflection of her worth or her value.
“You get caught up thinking that if I make something people will judge me on that, that’s my worth that’s my value so dissociating myself from the piece of work that I do - it’s not me,” she said. “My personal value is not in that piece of art that I created, like if people don’t like it, “Oh, they don’t like me” but I have to stop that because quite often that’s a slippery slope an artist can get into.”
This will be her third showcase but she had showcased a lot of different art forms such as big landscapes.
“I’m just really thankful that there is a place in the community to show work, like the Showcase and Parkside [galleries], and that other people have those opportunities too,” said Brown. “I’m just thankful that we have a thriving art community.”