View from a Croft 

Ian Barr

Ian Barr is a painter and sculptor, born in Glasgow and a graduate of Glasgow School of Art.  He lives and works on The Black Isle.  After graduating in the late sixties, he taught in schools and universities in Scotland and the USA. His work is represented in public and private collections both in the UK and abroad.  Ian Barr was a Trustee of the National Galleries of Scotland from 2005 until 2013.

 

His working process has been gradually changing, becoming less gestural and  more formally structured.  Most of Ian’s works, although abstract, are responses,artistic and emotional, to objects, places and 

memories.  The intention is to create objects that provide visual starting points which allow the viewer to see, not just with the eyes but with the mind, connections and resonances with their own experience. Although the works have their conception in places and objects and memories they are in no way replicating these sources.  They are objects in their own right, not representations of things in the world.

 

Creating each work is a long and frustrating business of making something out of nothing, a shape-shifting process with an ever-changing framework of something that only exists as a possibility, an idea inside the artist’s head.