BARRY MASTELLER
Barry Masteller was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the Silver Lake district, living and work-ing mostly in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Monterey, California. Since 2016, he has been working in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he has his painting studio. His paintings have been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions worldwide and are in multiple public and private collections, including the Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Achenbach Collection, San Francisco/ San Jose Museum of Art / Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History / Palm Springs Museum of Art / Crocker Art Museum / Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara / Montage Health Art Collection / Monterey Museum of Art / Bank of America Art Collection / Roche Life Scienc-es / Veritas Technologies / Siemens AG, and the University of California.
ARTIST STATEMENT
When I begin a painting I am rarely sure how it will resolve. It is in itself a part of a greater whole. That is; it has something in it of the work before it. In this I believe painting is like language and paintings like words, each making-up a kind of vocabulary whose meaning becomes clearer or at least more complete with each subsequent work.
My images are not of real places but of the imagined, felt or memorized-places of the mind, I like to think of them as magical and dream like aspects of the deeper mind and subconscious. However my work is not limited to making interesting or even thought provoking pictures, though I certainly hope they are. I am after all a painter; which means that paint itself is my medium of choice as opposed to other crafts. I find power and excitement in the medium and application, in the fluid to solid quality of the material. In glazing, scumbling, scratching, scraping and wiping
away, in the laying down of veils of color and in the pure physical interplay between the canvas and myself.
Painting for me is like magic, what you see is not what you see. The closer you get to the surface the more the picture fades away and its just about paint with all it's beautiful blemishes, brush marks, hair's, bubbles, cracks, and studio detritus. Step a few feet back and you re-enter the place of the subconscious and dreams.