Abstract image printed in yellow, red, blue, green, pink, purple, and orange ink.
Barbara Rae is a Royal Academician painter and master printmaker and is recognised internationally as an outstanding colourist.
Rae was educated at Morrison's Academy, Crieff in Perthshire, Scotland, studying at the Edinburgh College of Art, later lecturing at Charles Rennie Macintosh’s School of Art in Glasgow after some years as a secondary school art teacher.
In subject matter Rae's studies are of a socio-political nature, traces of human existence and artefacts weathered by time and fortune. She records time passing.
She is not interested in topography. Though pattern and structure in the background can be a dividend enriching the composition it's just as often ignored as incorporated in the image. Her point of departure is the history of a place and its people. Abstract expressionist themes are given maximum intensity: ancient Celtic standing stones bracing ominous dark skies; an abandoned farmhouse in famine racked west of Ireland; old ships in modern docks; ancient Anasazi rock art in the remotest parts of the Arizona Desert; sun-blasted vine terraces on a Spanish hillside. She distills the presence of mankind.
