Barbara J. Zucker's "40 Years of Painting: A Visual Journal" Exhibition at Ursinus College

Montgomery County artist Barbara J. Zucker paints nature’s
story. This retrospective of her work, which runs through March 23 at Ursinus College's Berman Museum of Art (see below for hours), will show changing phases of painting and life,
and also constants: a love of color, form and balance, the persistence of
landscape and a reference to the human body–overt or hidden–and a sensual
expression of the subject matter.

Nature, she says, “constantly intrigues me… [It] fills me
with a sense of nature’s mystery, power, and beauty.” Zucker’s paintings,
grouped by series, vary by style and medium, but consistently illustrate vivid
variations of nature’s colors, shapes, and textures. She has found that by
developing a subject in many ways over time, she is able to experience a place
more fully and continually discovers new variations.

The exhibition showcases work from each phase, works that
are transitional or that she personally has selected as her best work, or works
which capture her spirit at the time. These include moonscapes, goddess images,
paintings related to family events, organic forms in a geometric structure,
paintings inspired by travels, and a topiary series inspired by Longwood
Gardens near Philadelphia. More recent is the Stone Hill series depicting the
woods and sights of this Montgomery County area, and paintings of beloved Maine
locales, such as the salt water Mill Pond, “to celebrate its beauty, its
peacefulness and its changeability; infinite variations of colors, patterns on
the water, shapes of clouds, movements of the grass or times of the tide.”
Other favorite Maine places which find their way onto the canvases include the
blueberry fields which turn brilliant scarlet in autumn, islands beyond the
harbor, and the rocks and water on the Schoodic Peninsula, part of Acadia
National Park.

While these paintings are about special places, they are
equally studies in color, light, shape and other formal abstract elements. The
paintings have a contemporary feeling due to heightened colors and simplified
forms. In addition, many are painted on deep, wrapped canvases with the edges
painted rather than framed in a traditional manner. Many of the paintings
employ multiple panels: diptychs and triptychs.

“Nature,” she writes, is “more rich and varied than our
minds can imagine and in looking at the same subject matter over and over, I am
always excited by seeing something new.”

Barbara J. Zucker is a 1966 graduate of Ursinus College and
earned her master’s degree from Tyler School of Art in 1971. She is President
Emerita of Philadelphia/Tri State Artists Equity and was Exhibition Chair of
that organization from 1993 to 2010. Her paintings are in the permanent
collections of The Berman Museum of Art, The Reading Public Museum, Woodmere
Art Museum, Rosemont College and other public and private collections.