Barbara Sternberger: New Paintings

Northwest painter Barbara Sternberger’s gestural abstractions incorporate layers of color and mark making that appear casual and spontaneous. Unbounded by convention, the paintings arrive through purposeful mind-body awareness.

Sternberger’s “intuitive deployment of gesture to stoke emotional resonance in the viewer places her squarely within the ongoing lineage of Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters” (Richard Speer, ARTnews, Oct 2013).

Her work is “akin to the jazz solos of John Coltrane or Miles Davis . . . where the musicians use notes and intonation, Sternberger uses color and paint to explore the interstices, the space between tonal shifts and before the forms take shape” (Laura J. Crary, Whatcom Museum of History and Art, 2001)

A recent Betty Bowen Memorial Award Winner, Bellingham resident Barbara Sternberger was a painting Lecturer at Western Washington University from 1994 to 2014 and is collected widely.