Word: artists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...There were so many clothes, so much washing interrupting my painting," she recalls. "I was just trying to turn a detriment to my advantage." A little glue, a little canvas, a little lint -- in time she began to regard it as "so painterly." Still, there was the artist's dilemma: "What did I want it to say for me? I was looking for strong social commentary. I didn't want it to be a decorative thing. And then, of course! It could speak for what it was. The work became much more three dimensional...
Something broody crept into her work. From flowers, fashioned from lint and showcased in acrylic boxes, came scenes. An intimate birthday party, with a chocolate cake, flowers and candles on the table, two figures seated across from each other, and the artist's comment: "All the romantic items -- the roses and things -- sometimes obscure the other person. There is tension between the people. But it's a birthday! You still observe it. But the food might taste like lint...
From old photographs, Barron chronicled her family with lint portraits, and the results in some instances are haunting. Stand back, and there is a vibrant wedding party, the artist in the middle as a young flower girl; look close, and there is a jungle of fibers that came from the cuffs on your least favorite trousers. She has done four studies of her aged mother, who has been ravaged by Alzheimer's disease. In one there is a woman toddling along in a jogging suit, and in another there is a bent-down crone who has lost her mind...
...only that, when she thinks of the linty road ahead, the artist remembers that "one old man came up to me at a show and said, 'If you've got lemons, make lemonade,' and I thought that was a good way to look at life...
...never get any." That bit of wisdom might also be applied to the life of his creator, Charles Schulz, 64, who notes, "It seems beyond the comprehension of people that someone can be born to draw comic strips, but I think I was." Last week the soft-spoken artist was inducted into the Cartoonists Hall of Fame for 37 years of his Peanuts comic strip, which is carried in some 2,000 papers in 36 countries. Schulz is characteristically reflective about the enduring popularity of Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy and the rest of the gang. "They're nice little...