Ira Barkoff

Mountain Series, Orange Light

2025

Born in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York, Ira Barkoff’s paintings feature empty, Zen-like landscapes whose stillness reflects a location’s essence. Barkoff seeks to “portray a sense of vas...

American, b. 1934 Born in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York, Ira Barkoff’s paintings feature empty, Zen-like landscapes whose stillness reflects a location’s essence. Barkoff seeks to “por...

Born in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York, Ira Barkoff’s paintings feature empty, Zen-like landscapes whose stillness reflects a location’s essence. Barkoff seeks to “portray a sense of vastness” and instill feelings of awe in his viewers, he says. Furthering his exploration of the abstract, Barkoff paints in his studio, rather than en plein air, fabricating landscapes from his visual and emotional memories. The Impressionist-turned-Expressionist painter is inspired by the atmospheric qualities of works by Claude Monet and J. M. W. Turner and cites Gerhard Richter as a more contemporary influence. He recently transitioned from using a paintbrush to using a squeegee and palette knives for his work, as the latter allow for greater spontaneity and manipulation of color. He says of his work: “Looking at a blank canvas can be both exciting and frightening at the same time. Most of the time exciting wins out and I plunge in. That is, I paint the landscape, which for me is what it’s all about. The landscape represents nature and contemplating nature is being in touch with God. You could cast me as a modern-day Luminist-Tonalist-Impressionist. Monet’s Water Lilies have been a big influence, along with the landscape painter Wolf Kahn.” “The landscape is what I see before me or from my mind’s eye. When I paint a mountain or a tree, I’m not trying to capture the mountain or tree literally (that’s what a photograph does). I’m trying to express my inner spirit in the painting – to transcend the physical to reach the spiritual.” “My most successful pictures are not those that are the most accurate in terms of nature, but are the ones where the state of my consciousness allowed me to translate my feelings – my deepest inner feelings – to the canvas. When I get into this altered state...

Born in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York, Ira Barkoff’s paintings feature empty, Zen-like landscapes whose stillness reflects a location’s essence. Barkoff seeks to “portray a sense of vas...

Artist Statement: Painting is a meditation and a kind of alchemy in which I concentrate and transform my feelings and memories into something material that can be experienced in var...

Mountain Vista is an original painting, created with acrylic paint on gallery-wrapped canvas. It has a width of 20 inches and a height of 20 inches with...

Suzanne Winn Mountain III Original landscape painting Oil on canvas Image size: H 30cm x W 30cm x D 3.5cm Painted on a deep edge canvas which is corded and ready to hang. I find the Pembrokeshire landscape very inspiring. It is wild, rugged and timeless. The light is fantastic and there is an immense energy which flows through the landscape. Mountain III was inspired by Carn Penberry, one of the distinctive mountains that sits along the Pembrokeshire coastline as it stretches northwards from St David...

Artist Statement: Painting is a meditation and a kind of alchemy in which I concentrate and transform my feelings and memories into something material that can be experienced in var...