Barbara Peirson

What Makes Barbara Peirson’s Work Unique

Theatre, Memory and the Painted Story

Barbara’s path to painting was shaped by the theatre. Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, she initially trained as an actor and spent many years touring with theatre companies both nationally and abroad, always taking painting materials with her and recording her travels in sketchbooks and on scavenged pieces of cardboard. That theatrical sensibility, the instinct for staging, atmosphere and the tension of an unresolved moment, runs through everything she paints. Her compositions have the quality of scenes glimpsed mid-narrative, as though the viewer has arrived just before or just after something significant has happened.

The imagery in her paintings draws on multiple sources: half-remembered images from her travels and family life, imagined characters, forgotten fragments of text, old photographs. She sometimes introduces displaced figures from other eras into contemporary coastal settings, creating a gentle collision of time periods that adds to the dreamlike quality of her work. Elements of memory and imagination are fused with the environment that surrounds her in Wivenhoe: the mud flats, water meadows, big skies and the ever-changing estuary that she walks along most mornings at dawn, sketching marshland birds and small fishing vessels in the early morning mist.

Surface, Texture and the Process of Making

Painting mostly in acrylics, with occasional wax crayons, oil, gouache and acrylic ink, Barbara enjoys the textures of paint. Physically wiping off, scraping and playing with the surface is all part of her creative process. She paints on wood panel rather than canvas, building surfaces through layer upon layer of adjustment until the painting arrives at the quality she is looking for. This physical engagement with the surface gives her work a tactile richness that photographs only partially convey. In person, the paintings reveal scraped passages where earlier layers show through, areas of thickly applied colour alongside translucent washes, and the subtle grain of the wood panel contributing to the overall texture.

Her palette is distinctive and confident. Coastal blues and greens sit alongside warm earth tones, sandy pinks and the soft greys of overcast skies. Figures are rendered with a charming economy, often just a few strokes of colour suggesting a coat, a hat, a dog at someone’s side. This simplicity is deceptive: it takes considerable skill to reduce a figure to its essential gesture whilst making it feel alive and present within the broader landscape. Barbara achieves this with an assurance that comes from decades of daily painting practice, a practice she describes as the first thing she does when she wakes and the last thing she does before she stops for the day.