Inviting, Naive-Style Paintings by Barry Scanlan
Barry Scanlan is our featured artist for today! Barry creates inviting, naïve-style paintings that may look simplistic, but often have complex ideas behind them, and are painted using many different materials including acrylic, pumice, sand, clay, oil, and latex. Such a complex mixture creates paintings that demand to be seen up close.
Large, heavy brushstrokes and bright colours dominate Barry’s works, which heavily feature human subjects, and sometimes rather loving portraits of houses and buildings. The works sometimes take on a cubist appearance – several of Barry’s portraits are reminiscent of Picasso in the positioning and facial features of the subjects. Barry seems to have a real sense of humour about his work, which I as a viewer definitely appreciate! The artist is also clearly not afraid to experiment. The style that he uses ranges from tight and clearly outlined cartoonish images, to almost abstract, extremely loose works.
Barry lives and works in Milaca, Minnesota.
