Barbara Barnes is a visual artist with Art Images Live in Carrboro, NC. She creates live art sketches inspired by motion, activity, gestures, interactions, and performances. For Barnes, “art is alive, always changing with light and has content about the motion of any person, place or object portrayed… Throughout my lifetime I rarely shared my art as a ‘disabled person.’ The drawings, paintings, interactive art events and displays I create as an ‘enabled person,’ an artist with heightened tactile and visual creative abilities.”
Barnes earned a BFA in painting from Syracuse University with a Ford Foundation grant. Later earning a Therapeutic Recreation Associate degree, she worked to expand recreation and arts programming for disabled persons, seniors, and children residing in rural communities in Carteret County, NC. In 2013, she was awarded an Orange County NC Fall Project Grant to draw and paint a Visual Music art series. Since then she has completed several thousand drawings each year, representing the musical performances of thousands of different bands.
From December 2011 until recently, Art Images Live has been an inspiring focal point of a new gesture art, painting, and performing visual artist project. Barnes says that her lifetime of “learning abilities, creative skills and experiences is making it possible to share creatively not as a disabled person but as an inspired visual artist portraying performers sharing their talents within our communities.”
