Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 7

Joseph Barron
Draining the Swamp

2018

$7,500
£5,759.68
€6,600.52
CA$10,558.15
A$11,827.46
CHF 6,163.18
MX$144,270.59
NOK 78,319.94
SEK 73,850.12
DKK 49,264.47

About the Item

Joseph Barron graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA and MFA. Shortly after graduating, Barron was awarded a Pollock-Krasner foundation Grant that allowed him to create a series of works which helped him demonstrate the artistic strength that would help him to soon win another award, a New York City studio space grant from the Marie Walsh Sharp Foundation. Joe now lives in Sarasota County in Florida where he paints canvases and large-scale murals for public and private spaces. Joe is now focusing mainly on canvas works, drawing thematic material from current events and reconciling them with timeless archetypes and mythologies STATEMENT: The first goal: to perform the ritual of mixing and preparing the paint. The second: to make something intelligible in the language of paint, in a perceptual representational style drawing from history, to speak to a timeless ethos. My traditional technique lets me flex socially acceptable muscles in a sleight of hand that allows the deviant to slip in, and it also offers a personal disciplined challenge that gives me both pain and pleasure. I enjoy the deceitful convention of painting a visually recognizable form onto a two dimensional surface. My representational technique could be read as retrograde but that would be only a partial superficial and therefore inaccurate reading. I believe in my work, the technical style is also defiantly and simultaneously cutting edge, in its audacious triaxial intent of entertaining, informing and perplexing the audience in service of contemporary socio-geo-political criticism. Life is chaotic and wacky. But, it has a purpose. I don’t know what that purpose is, but it appears to me, (and of course I am not proclaiming anything that hasn’t been already proposed by wiser individuals than me), to be about energy- a harmony of energies or maybe a single energy that runs throughout everything or maybe that energy just simply is everything. The reason for our existence may not necessarily be a reason that we even can know. It might be a simple purpose and it might be complex, but one thing I’m sure of is that we are complex. Our sociology is complex. Our politics are complex. Our histories are complex. In my current work I’m starting my departure from a place in art history, albeit mainly that of western history. As a white male from the suburban Midwest I must start where I was planted, shedding ballast as I portage between points on the map. I’m exploring the past both visually and socio-politically and reconciling that past with current characters’ foibles and folly. I believe, that maybe more than ever, art is needed today, to preclude conflict and attempt healing. In today’s factional and toxic climate there is need for art which hands itself over in an enlightening, sympathetic way. My hope and belief is that a deflective display of comedy will be ultimately more persuasive than inflammatory demagoguery. I hope I am not so unique in this conviction but perhaps I would like to think of myself as singular in depiction, my particular assortment and juxtaposition of characters, which I draw into my art. My aim is to share a vision of optimism while also reflecting contemporary circumstances, whether they are triumphant or troubling. I always want to do this with humor, (well at least for now), and I truly always want to do this with critical self-scrutiny and I always want to do this with everything that I have in me. Having said all the above, with all of its self-conscious, pretentious, art-critical and philosophical clichés, plainly and simply, I just love to paint landscapes, plants, people and life. And, I hope, through art’s filter, some good comes of it
  • Creator:
    Joseph Barron (1959, American)
  • Creation Year:
    2018
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 45 in (114.3 cm)Width: 33.5 in (85.09 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    New Orleans, LA
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU10523248323

More From This Seller

View All
An Unfortunate Series of Distractions
By Joseph Barron
Located in New Orleans, LA
Joseph Barron graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA and MFA. Shortly after graduating, Barron was awarded a Pollock-Krasner foundation Grant that allowed him to crea...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Figurative Paintings

Materials

Acrylic

Resurrection, (study)
By Joseph Barron
Located in New Orleans, LA
Joseph Barron graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA and MFA. Shortly after graduating, Barron was awarded a Pollock-Krasner foundation Grant that allowed him to crea...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Figurative Paintings

Materials

Acrylic

Nasty Woman
By Joseph Barron
Located in New Orleans, LA
Joseph Barron graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA and MFA. Shortly after graduating, Barron was awarded a Pollock-Krasner foundation Grant that allowed him to crea...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Figurative Paintings

Materials

Acrylic

Inundation
By Nora See
Located in New Orleans, LA
“Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.” A quote oft attributed to various sources that was never actually uttered by any of them. Though Mark Twain elaborated on the sentiment...
Category

2010s Contemporary Figurative Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Maybe the horrendous can be okay?
By Jenny Day
Located in New Orleans, LA
Retreating from the stress and chaos of the last year, I created another landscape; populated by an army of friendly creatures. Here the burdens of coronavirus, climate change, and political division are dismissed by hot pink kittens that arc gracefully through meter showers and owls that bury into beds of daffodils. In this place worry is edged out by the fantastic and mystical snails trail neon candy canes through the scorched earth. The apocalyptic is supplanted by the surreal and the allegorical. Anxiety followed me. The escapist reflects and distorts its shadow world, the real, a funhouse mirror...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Animal Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Acrylic, Color Pencil

Good as Gold
By Carlton Scott Sturgill
Located in New Orleans, LA
medium: paint chip sample mosaic on panel Born in 1971 in Cincinnati, Ohio, CARLTON SCOTT STURGILL received his Masters of Arts (Fine Art) from London’s Chelsea College of Art in De...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Figurative Paintings

Materials

Mosaic, House Paint, Wood Panel

You May Also Like

Beginning of the End
By Charles Bragg
Located in San Francisco, CA
This artwork titled "The Beginning of the end" c.1990 is a color lithograph by noted American artist Charles Bragg, 1931-2017. It is hand signed and numbered 49/300 in pencil by the ...
Category

Late 20th Century Other Art Style Figurative Prints

Materials

Lithograph

French Contemporary Art by KEJ - Manip Génétic
By Kej
Located in Paris, IDF
KEJ is a French artist born in 1959 who lives & works in Paris, France. He is considered to belong to the movement of Figuration Libre & Outsider Art. His works are referenced in the...
Category

2010s Contemporary Figurative Paintings

Materials

Oil, Canvas, Acrylic

Reality's Allegory - 21st Cent, Contemporary, Figurative Painting, Oil on canvas
By Corvengi
Located in Barcelona, Catalonia
“Everything that surrounds me affects me. Memories, politics, nature, people, a dry leaf on the ground, music and books.” Corvengi’s works explore his version of a lost paradise, an...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Figurative Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Season of Change
By Jeffrey Batchelor
Located in Fort Lauderdale, FL
Oil on canvas
Category

Early 2000s Expressionist Interior Paintings

Materials

Oil

French Contemporary Art by KEJ - Le Phallocratre
By Kej
Located in Paris, IDF
KEJ is a French artist born in 1959 who lives & works in Paris, France. He is considered to belong to the movement of Figuration Libre & Outsider Art. His works are referenced in the...
Category

2010s Contemporary Figurative Paintings

Materials

Oil, Canvas, Acrylic

People on Display
By John Hardy (Artist)
Located in Long Island City, NY
People on Display John Hardy, American (1923–2014) Oil on Canvas Image Size: 30 x 40 inches Size: Size: 36 x 46 in. (91.44 x 116.84 cm)
Category

Late 20th Century Contemporary Figurative Paintings

Materials

Oil