Frances Barth’s imaginary landscape paintings are at once confounding and sublime. Radically abstract, they possess graphic clarity and are made of lush combinations of unnamable colors—saturated blue-grays, fiery orange-reds and pale yellow-greens—that don’t exist in nature. Barth, who was a professor of painting, drawing and critical issues at Yale University from 1986 to 2004, incorporates modeling, animation, diagramming, symbol mapping and charting to create a linear narrative. Layering expanses of color with cartographical lines rendered with hand-made stencils and engineering drafting pencils, Barth creates multiple viewpoints; an aerial perspective one moment, and in another, intimate views of lengths of abstract color.
