Elizabeth Barnes is the Artist of the Month for the North Augusta Artists Guild. She grew up in Maine, but North Augusta has been her home for the last 20 years. She says that she has always been interested in art and that her whole family was very creative. Her first drawing was in kindergarten. The drawing, “The Life Cycle of the Frog,” impressed her mother so much that she kept it for years. Her first experiences with sculpting were with snow, although nothing as simple as a snowman. She remembers as an adolescent she created a snow statue of a popular cartoon duck that was 6 feet tall. She participated in Art Club in high school and has taken art classes everywhere she has lived.
In the early 1980s Elizabeth attended a Homemaker Extension summer camp where she studied sculpting in clay. She loved the process and started taking classes at Sandhills Community College in North Carolina. Several years later she moved to Aiken and signed up to take a sculpture class at Augusta College. She had to pay out-of-state tuition for that class, but fortunately, in 1988, Augusta College started to allow Aiken County residents to attend for in-state rates. She then enrolled in the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree program there and graduated with honors in 1992. She credits her teachers, Steve Greenquist, for teaching her a solid traditional foundation in sculpture and Brian Rust, for urging her to take the freedom to expand her talents and techniques beyond the basics. She is especially grateful for being taught the essential values of excellent craftsmanship and attention to detail.
Elizabeth’s favorite artist is French sculptor Camille Claudel. She had exceptional talent and she planned and produced work of very ambitious size. She had to work against the harsh restrictions on female artists in the mid-19th century. She coped with many gender-related limitations on her artistic training and the prevailing male dominance of the Ministry of Fine Arts and the Salon juries. She became an assistant to the famed sculptor Rodin around 1884. Most of her time in his studio was spent working on difficult pieces such as the hands and feet of the figures for his monumental “The Gates of Hell.” As she matured as an artist she created powerfully expressive figurative sculptures of her own that also showed grace and delicacy.
Many of Elizabeth’s sculptures have these same qualities of power and grace. Her favorite mediums for carving are alabaster and soapstone. She was very amused when one of her classmates called her “The Master of Alabaster.” Many of her stone sculptures are abstract shapes, although she also does figurative and animal forms in clay. She begins each sculpture by studying the raw piece of stone from every angle. She then sketches her desired lines on the stone with charcoal. She uses chisels to cut in her basic rough outlines for the design. One of her favorite tools for this stage is a farrier’s file. Although this tool is generally used to give horses new shoes, she says that it works especially well to both remove areas of stone and to shape the desired form. The next step is finishing the surface with coarse sandpaper before moving on to the finishing touches with fine sandpaper.
During each stage of the process, Elizabeth is mindful of the design elements of line, shape, form and space. She includes textured and smooth areas for both variety and contrast. Because some pieces of alabaster are translucent, she is careful to consider lightness, darkness and color too. Painters must consider these elements of design on a flat surface, but sculptors must constantly consider these elements in all three dimensions. In addition, the base of each piece must be carefully fashioned to complement the piece. Even the smallest details matter to this artist.
Balance is always foremost in Elizabeth’s mind as she creates her design. Many of her sculptures are created to seem precarious. This creates visual tension and energy, but in reality the piece must actually be balanced to be stable. This is not an easy task. Elizabeth says one of her guiding philosophies is “life is a balancing act.” She feels that, for artists, life and art are on the same continuum and can never be separated. When asked what is the best advice she has ever gotten, she replies that Shakespeare’s “to thine own self be true” is her favorite. She believes that the key to a happy and balanced life is “love what you do and do what you love.” She says that she wants her art to convey joy, peace and a sense of calm to the viewer. She says that her own motivations for making art are for the sheer pleasure of creation and the inevitable surprises inherent in the process.
Elizabeth also has a business, Artful Expectations, that specializes in making belly casts to celebrate and commemorate the birth of a child. These casts can be painted in any fashion that the client would like as a permanent reminder of this special time. Her work has been exhibited in many solo and group shows and her sculptures are in the permanent collections of both national and international institutions. Her work can be seen locally at the gift shop at the Arts and Heritage Center in North Augusta and at New Moon Café in Augusta. She is a member of Clay Artists of the South East and the North Augusta Artists Guild. When Elizabeth is not making art, she loves to travel. She and her husband have visited 48 states since his retirement. She also enjoys photography, swimming and kayaking. In addition to these activities she also plays the piano. She can be contacted at artfulexpectationsbyelizabeth@gmail.com.
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April 30, 2020 at 08:50PM
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Barnes is N.A. Artists Guild's Artist of the Month - The Star
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