Barbara Rowe The Artist Essay, Research Paper

Barbara Rowe. On top of being a woman artist who does what she wants in life, she is also a full time mother and owns her own private business. All of her work is very personal in some way, shape, or form to her. She believes that an artist tells you in their own unique way about the times they live in.

Ms. Rowe s works are mainly prints and collages. She decided that this was the medium that she was destined to use when she was enrolled in college. The only courses left for her to take, photography and printmaking, helped to shape her life. When she is completing a piece of artwork, she sometimes adds to the final piece by also creating a frame for it. She builds the frame herself, and then decorates it in some fashion with a collage of wallpaper, phrases, or whatever she feels it needs.

Throughout her life, Barbara Rowe has completed many a series of artwork. One series was that of a collection of her view on fairy tales from her childhood. Since most every child has in some time or another read these fairy tales, almost everyone can relate to this series. The works are quite a blend of fantasy, reality, maybe even some satire, but mostly a longing for our childhood days. One of these pieces, entitled The Princess and the Pea, was shown to us in our classroom. Its frame was exquisitely decorated with a collage made up of different materials, and over this were stray words with the purpose of making us remember the children s story and the feelings it gave us at the time we read it many years ago. Even the glass over the picture had words imprinted upon it, underneath so as not to be ruined, in white letters that are supposed to look incredible when under a show light. She liked to call these, and words that may lie anywhere else on her artwork, floating words .

When asked if she ever appropriates her artwork, Barbara seemed not to even know what we meant. Every piece of her work is an original, out of her own mind. She may like to use the style of an admired artist, but she does not appropriate from them. The only exception to this is her work, The Emperor s New Clothes. She used Donatelli s David as the model for the Emperor.

Barbara Rowe was brought up in a very religious way, and although now that she is an adult who has given up these beliefs, they have still left a very poignant imprint upon her soul and mind. One of her works, the Five Martyrs, is one amazing piece of artwork. It is a book of passion, religion, and emotion. It is created with the finest detail on every page, each of which depicts a different saint and their story. Unfortunately, this fantastic work of art may not be touched when it is on display, only looked upon. Nevertheless, it must be a wondrous sight!

Ms. Rowe liked to use her body in her artwork. In her prints, she would use her own body as a stamp for the ink. In Saint Perpetua, she used her own torso to create an image of art. She used almost every part of her body to create these images, from her legs to her torso to her arms. The first body portrait she ever created was that of a girl sitting. The point of the piece was to prompt the beholder to ask themselves what emotion it portrayed.

One day when she was using human models to create art, she noticed that something more interesting than the models themselves was their clothes, which were lying in a heap on the floor. She then went on to using the shapes that these heaps of clothes created as images in her printmaking. She also thought that her pictures posed. She would use images of kimonos, flowers, and other objects to express her feelings.

Barbara Rowe is truly an extraordinarily skillful artist. She has her life completely in balance, and manages to have fun at the same time. She loves her work, and does it incomparably. She is an amazing woman, and a role model for us all, men and women alike.