The Black Hills area provides an endless opportunity to field explore, learn, and feel visual images of geological events and ancient living forms that unfolded throughout billions of years. Hiking and exploration encourage me to approach the natural environment with curiosity and a sensitive awareness — and if all aligns — allow me to conceive and create artwork.
It is challenging to view nature’s functional design for life and creatively interpret evolvement with colors, textures, and forms. The smallest nuances of nature influence my artwork — including the iridescence of ancient ammonites, light dancing on faces of crystalline minerals, and rock formations freely sculpted throughout geologic time. These visual perceptions result in artworks based on the strength of nature’s designs.
To this end, I collaborate with science to make art and invite viewers to experience each piece of artwork as an essence of discovery.
BIOgraphy
The ancient world and nature themes in Barbara Kieffer Rowe’s works combine the artist’s fascination with forms and events belonging to the Earth over millions of years. Her advanced degrees in art, geology, and paleontology influenced a wide range of imagery that incorporates intrinsic natural design. Barbara treasures artistic expression of local images that emphasize pattern, color, shape and texture developed predominantly with layers of acrylic paint. Her work intuitively and personally captures the Black Hills’ beauty and ancient intrigue in innovative multimedia processes that frequently coalesce with specimens from the area’s world-famous rocks and fossils.
“A human is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, an optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a prison for us, restricting us to personal desires and to affection for a few nearest persons. Our task is to free ourselves from prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”