Barbara E. Cohen Biography

Barbara Cohen received her B.F.A. from Tufts University and the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with earlier studies in art history at Oxford University. She has received numerous grants including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Artists Foundation MA Fellowship Program, Polaroid Artist Support Program, Blanche E. Colman Award and the Cambridge and Massachusetts Arts Councils. She has been a finalist for the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, NYC in 2003 and 2004. Her drawings appear in the slide registry at The Drawing Center in NY. She received a colony residency to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Barbara has exhibited her paintings and sculpture in numerous galleries and museums across the country.

Barbara is the author of the book Dog in the Dunes: Revisited 2005, and Dog in the Dunes 1998, a series of painted photographs of her black Labrador, Gabe, set in the dunes of Cape Cod, first published by Andrews McMeet and recently by Fields Publishing. In following, her next book Provincetown: East West a selection of her painted Polaroid landscapes of this small seaside town was published in the spring of 2002 by University Press of New England. Barbara lives and works in Provincetown and Manhattan and is currently working of a book of New York. Her giclee prints from her books are represented at the Kennedy Studios of Provincetown.

ARTIST STATEMENT ON POLAROID PAINTINGS

Throughout my twenty-five year art career I have worked with 35mm film along side my abstract painting and sculpture. Within the past fifteen years I have been working on abstract methods to created photographic images that appear painterly and at the same time hold up as photographs. Using SX 70 and 600 Plus Polaroid film. I manipulate the images I photograph as the film is developing, thus creating abstract effects with line. I push the image further by oil painting onto the Polaroid surface. The combination of the line drawn with a pointed instrument which changes the surface of the photograph and loosely oil painting over selected areas of the picture allows for an original multi-image.