Southwest Artist Goes Over the Edge

Barbara Spencer Jump paints the southwest with a feminine expressionistic view.  Her inspiration is reality but she strives to paint an emotional response and her paintings are more about feeling than seeing, and more about a mood than a season.  Her trademark is extending parts of the image to the mat.

Watercolor and acrylic allow the immediacy that she claims to need for the creative process.  “They allow me to paint quickly.  This ability to use less time in the actual painting permits me to compose stage and translate another reality for my viewers before my emotional inspiration leaves.” says Jump during a visit to her studio. 

This work is not traditional southwest. It’s a very contemporary southwest with clear, bright colors, and subject matter to make you smile. The work crosses over boundaries in several directions, from southwest to country and with a change of mat and frame, has been used by several clients for a more contemporary venues.

Barbara Ann spoke for a while about her work, “Every painting was conceived from experiencing the life here in the desert on a personal level.  I’ve taken thousands of reference photographs, done hundreds of sketches and sometimes, small watercolors, done on location.

“Large works are completed in the studio, but they are not reproductions of the photographs or the sketches done on location.  I pick out this cactus, that palo verde, an ocotillo or two and arrange them in a pleasing composition with a line drawing.   

“I use perspective in an unusual manner, for example:  placing small vegetation in the prominent foreground, so that it is the main focus and not secondary to the majestic saguaro.  This becomes the element to extend to the mat when appropriate. 

“Once the line drawing is completed I put away all reference photos and sketches and paint from memory and emotion and the work becomes a unique individual without expectations of faithful reproduction of any other idea or plan.”

Barbara Ann Spencer Jump has been painting for most of her life.  Professionally for the past 20 years.  Originally from Texas, she’s made her home in Arizona for 40 years, and feels “right at home” with the desert, the mountains, the huge open skies that are a kaleidoscope of colors at sunrise, sunset and on rainy days.   

Jump travels through out Arizona, and to California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and sometimes Texas, to show her work in some of the best “juried” art festivals in the southwest.  

Her works of art are also found in galleries and a few other venues through out Arizona.  Tourists and natives alike enjoy her view of the desert and life in the southwest.

Barbara sells originals, open editions and limited edition giclees with or without painted mats on line.  Visit with Barbara Ann at her web site at http://www.southwestartist.net