Barbara Takenaga

Artist Biography

In music a good translator is needed to animate written marks into sound and song. Barbara Takenaga is just such an improviser. Tracking time as she works by obsessively following patterned marks of spirals, dots, and lines, the artist creates visual compositions that vibrate with fluid, idiosyncratic cadences.

Often structured around a central vanishing point, the artist’s labyrinthian worlds, make reference to ‘60s psychedelia, op art, mathematics, butterfly wings, supernatural emanations, and the magnified vision achieved through the lens of both telescope and microscope. Takenaga energizes the surface of her prints with her synergetic color selections and the addition of metallic powders directly into the ink.

Barbara Takenaga is a Professor of Art at Williams College in Massachusetts.

Selected Collections: CU Art Museum, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO; The News Corporation, New York, NY

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