This conversation took place during June and July 2024 ahead of Karen Barbour’s exhibition at Moon Grove, Manchester.

Simon Grant: You were born in San Francisco. Can you tell me a bit about your upbringing?

Karen Barbour: My mom was a great artist, but she married young and never pursued it. She drew and painted really well. She was six feet tall and always laughing and talking to everyone. She made all our clothes. My dad was a doctor and very quiet and serious, always studying geology, astrology – just everything. He collected little bottles of sand and rocks from wherever he went. He wrote in notebooks his whole life. The writing was so small you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it. He wrote in address books so the guide letters could direct him quickly to his subjects. He made beautiful drawings of nature and physiology and many maps. He painted in oil also, but he must have destroyed everything because he eventually gave all his paint to me. He never stopped reading until a few weeks before his death. There were books about science, and history magazines piled up in his office and throughout his house, and a path between these towers of magazines so that he could get to the chairs in his office. My parents met on the American River that runs from the Sierra Nevada. Growing up we went on many river trips and to the wild beaches in California. We backpacked in the Sierra for weeks, taking pack horses in and then hiking out. We were expected to climb big peaks without complaint. It was difficult, and I remember the grown-ups didn’t like the whining I did. We were encouraged to swim in cold water, to jump in lakes with icebergs, to body surf big waves in the ocean.

SG: Did you draw as a child, or were you more into reading?

KB: I drew from as early as I can remember. My dad saved the cardboard that came from his folded laundered shirts so I could draw on them. The babysitter complained when she saw that I was drawing naked people when I was four years old. I remember feeling bad about it. But I was curious to figure out what that might look like. I also drew horses and cows with lines identifying every part of the body. I drew animals with clothes on. I spent a lot of time with those how-to-draw books. It was the only thing I was halfway good at. I was a very bad student and disruptive in class.

SG: You went to the University of California, Davis where you were taught painting by Mike Henderson. Was that a good experience?

KB: Yes, Mike Henderson is my hero. I also studied with Robert Arneson, Wayne Thiebaud, Roland Peterson, and Manuel Neri. Mike also made films, so with his teacher’s assistant I got involved with that. I started obsessively making animations. After I graduated from Davis, I worked at a convalescent hospital for a year and later applied to San Francisco Art Institute. At the time I was watching films and doing animation. I acted in a Mike Kuchar film called Bloodsucker (1975) because I was his teaching assistant. I also drew thousands and thousands of drawings to make animations. I had no idea what I was doing.

SG: Were you gravitating towards film or thinking more broadly?

KB: I knew always from early on that I wanted to be a painter. The fact that I drew so much gave me a certain ease and bravery to approach making work. I made a lot of bad art, but I was fearless. Being around George and Mike Kuchar and seeing the way they made films, that it was about following your inspiration, and being around Mike Henderson – his studio was in San Francisco – was simply about making the work, pursuing ideas.

SG: Tell me how you got into writing and illustration.

KB: After getting my MFA in film I thought I would be able to get jobs painting animation cells. I applied to work on an animated film, and they didn’t hire me. I was working for a caterer as a waitress and cook. In the time I wasn’t working I was making paintings on watercolour paper and drawings for animations. So, I ended up making a lot of paintings. I then showed some of these in a group show in San Francisco and somebody came up to me, told me I should be an illustrator and gave me a list of contacts to call. I went to New York and showed my work to New York Magazine. The art director said it was the worst presentation she’d ever seen, but she gave me a job to make paintings of five different nightclubs. After that, I did illustrations for magazines including Vogue, The Atlantic, Glamour, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, as well as for Bloomingdales and Ralph Lauren. I also did some big painting commissions. I was making animations for MTV logos as well as projected animations for The Tubes and The Pointer Sisters at concerts. I also did billboards for the Mitsukoshi Ginza department store in Tokyo and had a show there at The Shiseido Gallery in 1989. I made many book covers, and at some point, an editor from a publishing house contacted me about doing children’s book illustrations. I told her I had written a story, and after a short time I was signed up. Despite thinking that I didn’t know how to create consistent characters from page to page, I wrote and illustrated many books. And it was always very spontaneous – the editor gave me so much freedom and support, but looking back, I find a lot of the work embarrassing. 

SG: At this time, did you see yourself as an artist?

KB: Painting was always my main obsession. I also needed to make a living, and I was working constantly at such a fast pace. I don’t think the illustrations were great, but I tried mostly to work on 22 x 30-inch paper, which is a very consistent format, but many people didn’t want to have illustrations that large. I think I was tricking the client. I would lay out what they needed but at the same time satisfying something that I was searching for. The work made it possible for me to have a loft in New York City and to pay for big stretcher bars and for paint. It felt pompous to say aloud that I was an artist. It felt like people didn’t want to know or hear about me being a painter at all, so I kept it to myself.

SG: In 2001 you had your first exhibition with Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco. How did that come about?

KB: My kids were small at the time, and I made myself walk into his gallery and asked him if he would look at some work. He was really nice and looked though all the piles of paintings I had brought in. He then said I could do a show there. I had another show with him in 2005. 

SG: Moving forward in time, in 2022 you had your show at White Columns, New York. How did that come about?

KB: Someone told me to apply for the White Columns online registry a long time ago, so I had work on there. I also followed all of the White Columns shows. Daisy was home for a period, and I told her to apply for the Registry too. She did and was accepted, and soon after the director of White Columns Matthew Higgs contacted her about doing a show. I immediately knew that was going to be amazing. I guess Daisy must have spoken to Matthew about me because later he asked Daisy and I to do a show together at the Felix Art Fair in Los Angeles. I had never realized that when I had kids, I was going to have these kindred spirits to talk about stuff and make things with. I was thrilled to do the show with Daisy. At that point we were painting a lot together in the studio and listening to incredible books on tape for hours and hours and working very closely together. It was one of the most exciting things that has ever happened to me. When we were in L.A., Matthew asked me to do the show at White Columns and I was so happy. It was incredible when he came to pick the work out. I have so much respect for him.

SG: Where does your imagery come from? Is it imaginary or based on many influences?

KB: It is both imaginary and based on influences. Most days images pop into my head. I want to remember them, but they are fleeting and can disappear instantly. I try to paint or draw them as quickly as I can. Also, If I read anything, there are words and ideas and designs that inspire me. I have drawings of the things I might read about. If I don’t know about something, I’ll look it up and I put it in my notebooks. When something is unfocused or too small to see, and it triggers an image, I also draw those. I see images on the floor or in shadows and in trees. A lot of times I’ll take an old illustration I did, and bit by bit, change it into something else. I will keep part of the image and because it’s somewhat still there, for me there’s an oddness to this that I like. I will erase something very detailed that I have worked on for a long time if I get the impulse. A lot of the time the image evolves on its own, in layers and with additions that also seem to happen on their own. I draw the people, dogs, beaches, and forests around me. But these are fantasy landscapes with lakes suspended from mountain tops and weird birds and cats stuck in a tree, and Eve’s tears turning to flowers. There are abstracted air balloons, planets and stars, the firmament, birds in clouds, and flower forms. Many have evolved from more realistic landscapes that are buried many layers beneath them.

SG: Motifs like towers and similar vertical structures appear often in your work. Can you tell me about these?

KB: I started making abstract paintings and what I call ‘stacks’ around 2004, which I thought of as figures or people. I think they evolved into towers, for them to subsequently become waterfalls, mountains, pinnacles, peaks, lakes, rivers, moons, stars, and clouds, etc. These structures are basically scaffolding for things I want to paint, such as arches – eyeballs, clouds, faces – flower forms, disks, wheels, skirts, windows, and shoes. Many times, I cut up old paintings and illustrations to make the towers, and I cut up watercolour paper to make shapes.SG: For your exhibition at Moon Grove in Manchester you have made a new body of work as well as including pieces that you have re-visited over the years. Can you say a little bit about them?

KB: Sure. In Pincurl Tree with Jeweller’s Window (2024) there are a lot of images set within a stage. They are like dolls houses within which I can move things around. I keep seeing a tree shape: pin curl/pin wheel circular shapes with spinning spiralling lines filled with objects, dots and shapes embedded within. This painting has changed radically many times. It has been cut up and added to. Previously it contained figures and bugs that have disappeared. In Wilderness with Plant Scaffolding (2024) the work has gone through years and years of changes. There was a bird and a frog dancing. It has a kind of a stage setting with flower forms that I’m trying to fill with shapes. Peanut Garden (2024) has been through a million changes. It’s a weeping willow tree that was set in many changing landscapes. Finally, I start gluing paper on top. It’s not that I felt that the image is particularly bad, it’s that the impulse to find a surface to put my idea on very quickly overrides everything. In many of these works there is a cutting up of little abstractions and pieces to assemble towers, an attempt to get the square shape that contains this quagmire of intersecting lines and shapes and maybe a head that I’m trying and failing to re-create. In Return Stroke and Chimney Smoke (2024) I have pictured a phenomenon where lightning hits the ground and shoots back up. There’s also a William Morris patterned square. The idea for Variation on Lana’s Aeronautic Machine (2024) is taken from an old book – drawings of the first flying contraptions – but then my interpretation is inaccurate and combined with a butterfly and a cut-up machine-like stack: the butterfly is a kite with a tail trailing behind. And Crinoline Armature (2024) is square shaped. In many of these works it is about taking a landscape and altering it with childhood images that I’m very drawn to: frogs, cats, birds, mice, butterflies, my toys – the haunting painting of a frog playing a violin in my room, for example – and staring at dolls that my grandmother gave me; their painted faces and shoes, not quite perfect, with their underwear painted on. Stacked skirts and dirndls and petticoats, and pin curls that were put in my hair; the hair twisted around into a circle and these bobby pins crossing each other; the smocking of my dresses and my mother’s interest in them; the petticoats we wore under dresses.

SG: How do you make the work. Is it intuitive or do you plan out each one?

KB: It’s intuitive and I have no idea what will happen. I collect my ideas and try to put them into the paintings. Most of them evolve slowly over a long period of time. I work spontaneously and the pictures are constantly changing.

SG: The mixture of colours that you use feels very much your own. How do these emerge? 

KB: It’s a struggle with the back and forth of colours interacting. I love putting different colours next to each other and am striving to make each painting resolve into what I’m trying to get at: the combination of two or three colours vibrating against each other. I try and try and paint over and over and never know what’s going to happen. I want to paint in pastel colours, but I think the desire to have the image ‘pop’ pushes me to veer towards excavating an image through sharp contrasts. A few years ago, I started having more piercing visions than I was used to, and I discovered that I was experiencing temporal lobe seizures. It’s okay now and not serious, especially compared to sitting with my 102-year-old father in his last years, who hallucinated and saw people and things on the ceiling and in the walls. My dad’s hallucinations were amazing and felt parallel to what was happening to me. He had interesting visions, and he was excited and talked for hours about them. Looking back, I think he might have been seeing people and experiencing memories in a very vivid way. At the time, it was overwhelming because it went on for days and nights. When my seizures happened, I was stricken with powerfully intense barrages of very accurate memories from my life. It was also very exciting. I would immediately lie on my back and start staring in shock, and start talking about what I was seeing, like my dad did. I now know that these detailed and vivid memories are inside all of us. Medication has stopped that from happening now. It was truly wonderful in a way, but at the same time, unbelievably impossible to withstand.

SG: You have used particularly resonant and wonderfully evocative words to describe artworks and your approach to them. I’m thinking of phrases such as ‘frilly blouse syndrome’ and ‘Binocular Rivalry’, for example.

KB: I come across words when reading and I will riff on them in the notebooks and the paintings. They might change from what the real definition is. In The Feminine Mystique (1963) Betty Friedan describes the ‘Frilly Blouse Syndrome’ as when women wear ultra-feminine clothing. This is also mentioned by Linda Nochlin in her 1971 essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’. I picked it up from some random reading and I interpret it in my own way. It sounds serious and funny simultaneously. People have told me that I dress like a boy a lot in my life, and that it’s not a good thing. There are so many decisions about clothes; getting dressed and choosing what to wear; whether to wear ‘colourful’, ‘flowery’, ‘tight’, or ‘structured’; dresses and girdles, it’s interesting. I like the image possibilities of a frilly blouse. ‘Binocular Rivalry’ is about perception alternating between different images presented to each eye. I usually make a dumbed down image, which is not that accurate, but it’s one I use a lot; to me it has become about ‘eye rivalry’. They’re receiving bursts that don’t make sense.

SG: And ‘dotified’?

KB: Different arrangements of dots – big or small – appear to me in various shapes or patterns. Sometimes I dotify to cover and or to unify; it’s a slow process where I add small amounts and then move to a different painting. I turn works around and around, it’s a weird thing to do. I then wonder why I’m doing it, but I can’t stop, it’s calming and satisfying. I struggle with this process sometimes, but I try different things and works will suddenly take shape and start to come together.

SG: I get a sense from your work that you have spent a long time looking at, and thinking about, art by many artists both past and present. Can you tell me a few artists that you admire?

KB: There are so many: Albert York, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Bob Thompson, Gustave Moreau, Ruth Asawa, Etel Adnan, Rafael Delacruz, Serge Poliakoff, Winifred Nicholson, Rose Wylie, Forest Bess, March Avery, Milton Avery, Mike Henderson, Eva Hesse, David Hockney, Horace Pippin, Bill Traylor, Chris Ofili, Alice Neel, Marisa Merz, Carole Gibbons, Arther Dove, Fairfield Porter, Lois Dodd, Sonia Delauney, Eileen Agar, Cindy Sherman, Lisa Yuskavage, Carroll Dunham, Dorothea Tanning, Robert Gober, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Walter Swennen, Jess, David Byrd, Bill Lynch, William Edmondson, Merlin James, Alvaro Barrington, Francis Picabia, Gertrude Abercrombe, Ruby Neri, Kai Althoff, Sergej Jensen, Thomas Hirschhorn, Paula Modersohn Becker, Bendix Harms, Katharina Wulff, Joseph Holtzman, Susan Cianciolo, Unica Zurn, Thornton Dial, Amelie Von Wulffin, Ellen Gronemeyer, Auste, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Munch, Elizabeth Osborne, Goya, Vittore Carpaccio, Botticelli, Turner, Giotto, Andrea Mantegna, James McNeill Whistler and many, many more.

SG: Wow, what a list. One last question: what are you working on at the moment?

KB: I’m making a lot of small works on paper. And I continue to paint in oil on my old canvases, and new ones too. I’m also making small ceramic cats, and heads, and making sculptures from plastic bags, string and plaster. Daisy is visiting as well so we are working together!