IRA BARKOFF: RADIANT LIGHT-SELECTED PAINTINGS
January 29th-March 5th, 2011
Brick Walk Fine Art is pleased to announce our next exhibition featuring selected paintings by distinguished Connecticut landscape painter Ira Barkoff.
Ira Barkoff was born in 1934 and studied at the Art Students League in New York under Robert Brackman and Robert Beverly Hale (former curator of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). He went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at New York’s Pratt Institute. He lives and works in Cornwall, Connecticut and also teaches at the Washington Art Association.
Barkoff’s work has been extensively featured in publications, including in The New York Times and American Artist Magazine. His work can be found often in solo exhibitions in galleries all along the East Coast, while his juried and group exhibitions span the country. His work is featured in numerous collections, like that of the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Durham Ziff Collection in New York and Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.
Prominent American art historian Richard J. Boyle has written that "Ira Barkoff became fascinated with landscape painting from the time his parents took him to the Catskills in the summers, where he painted his first landscape at an early age. “When I was ten years old…and looking up at a blue sky with fast moving cotton ball clouds. I thought, ‘I have to remember the sky…remember every single cloud...Barkoff began with a quiet observation of fact, but soon a more romantic sensibility emerged in which the expression of his ideas was based more on memory and imagination. “My landscapes,” he said, “are not literal depictions of New England…but are distillations of visual / emotional memories.” Working in his studio in natural light, Barkoff paints to music – usually opera, sometimes Chopin, which, he says helps put him “in the zone,” to keep to his romantic point of view. Yet, despite his habit of working from imagination and memory, Barkoff’s landscapes still manage to evoke an extraordinary sense of place and if many of his landscapes are painted en premier coup, they evoke an extraordinary stability and presence. In addition, he has transformed his influences into something entirely his own. It is clearly apparent that here is a lyric artist who has created memorable images and possesses a quiet originality, quietly achieved."