by Natasha Khairullah
Staff Writer
One national painter has found some unique inspiration in the River City.
Artist Pamela Barnett is a painter who specializes in negative space painting and designs and creates hand-made jewelry using semi-precious stones. Though she’s lived all over the United States, she says that Jacksonville’s arts scene has a lot to offer various artists, and the city has served as inspiration for some of her most recent pieces.
After over 30 years of painting and her first Art Walk exhibition in Jacksonville, Barnett, 52, still asserts that she has the most to learn from artists around her, both up and coming and veterans.
“It’s not just what’s here, but it’s who’s here,” she said. “It’s the people that really inspire me.”
Originally from Columbus, Ohio, Barnett, 52, grew up in northern California around the San Francisco Bay area and said since she was a young girl she enjoyed painting.
After high school, she attended Baldwin Wallace College in Ohio where she studied Computer Science but knew that at some point, she wanted to make a living as a painter.
“That’s when I started taking art classes and workshops around town,” she said. “I wanted to learn as much as I could.”
Barnett spent most of her adult life working in the field of software engineering and training, but continued visiting galleries and viewing presentations in any and every city that she visited for business.
“I didn’t get serious about it (painting) as a profession until I saw a calligraphy presentation/show in Cleveland,” she said. “I saw some of the beautiful watercolor work that surrounded some of the calligraphy and I took up both and then I branched off into full painting.”
From that point on, whenever Barnett traveled to another city, she’d take photos and then go back to her hotel room and paint what she had seen. Gradually after the calligraphy show, she began to dabble in the type of panting she specializes in full-time now.
Barnett explained watercolor using negative space painting.
“This is when you paint a painting and the background defines the foreground object,” she said.
If the object is a flower for example, the flower isn’t painted; instead the background is painted. The white space left is the paper or canvas showing through the painting. Usually, the lighting has to be carefully manipulated for this type of painting.
“The lighting usually comes from very unusual angles,” said Barnett. “For me, it usually comes from the bottom left.”
Barnett continues to travel all over — Boston, Hong Kong, London, New York City, Los Angeles — to find inspiration.
“Inspiration, that’s part of why I loved all the art in historic St. Augustine,” she said. “I went crazy at the square.”
Two years ago, Barnett took on a new project using semi-precious stones to make jewelry.
“I was actually shopping one day and I saw some beads that I thought would make a beautiful necklace,” she said. “I’m kind of one of those Renaissance people, so I bought these beads and immediately, all my friends started saying, ‘that’s a beautiful necklace,’ or ‘nice earrings’ and that’s how it all began.”
Barnett will customize jewelry and color match and all of her pieces are lightweight.
“I make jewelry for real women,” she said. “It can be a center focal piece, but it doesn’t need to be heavy and big.”
Barnett lives in St. Augustine and is a member of the Jacksonville Water Color Society and the Jacksonville Consortium of African-American Artists. Her work has been displayed at the Beaches Art Gallery and she plans to exhibit her work monthly at Art Walk. To arrange a viewing, she can be e-mailed at [email protected]