Biography from Tree’s Place Gallery
Contemporary American Impressionist painter Sam Barber’s work has been exhibited internationally, and is currently represented in the permanent collections of over thirty-five public and university art museums across the United States.
Born in Europe in 1943, Barber was brought to live in New York as a child. His artistic talent was quickly recognizable, and earned him a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York. In the mid-1960’s, Barber, still in his early twenties, began working with Henry Hensche in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Now in his artistic maturity, Barber has developed over the past three decades a style which has roots in Hensche’s color theory, and in American and French Impressionism (particularly Hassam, Monet, and Degas), but which at the same time is identifiably his own.
Open, light, and airy, Barber’s paintings are typified by intensely saturated “broken color” brushwork of great chromatic complexity. His subject matter is primarily drawn from the area near his Cape Cod home, but is frequently supplemented by materials from his travels in France and Italy and from urban settings, the latter generally public parks and gardens.
Barber has been exhibited widely in one person shows in the South and Midwest as well as New York and New England. He has won numerous national and regional prizes and awards, and has been the subject of feature articles in various publications. He is a member of the Society of American Impressionists.
