Word: barron
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...year after she turned from oils to lint, Barron was divorced and, she says, happily so. The last stop in the peripatetic life of a military wife was Long Beach, and there she settled in a stucco house with a cedar-shake roof, palms and jacarandas along the street, rosebushes and jasmines running along the fence. From this base she would attain a master's in fine arts, a job teaching at nearby Brooks College and a world of lint. Friends, neighbors, students began to save...
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...
Occasionally Barron creates whole lint rooms, or "conceptual environmentals," or simply, as she often puts it, installations. One of the most intriguing was called Six o'Clock News. Its inspiration: "I would visit my parents, and they would be watching the news, not knowing what was going on, just sitting there with the TV, lost." It is an 18-ft. by 27-ft. room -- in all, enough lint to fill a U-Haul van, ceiling to floor, which it does. It is like one of those Koren cartoons in The New Yorker -- everything and everybody is fuzzy -- except...
...together such a thing, she pastes lint to the furnishings in the room and the wire figures that represent her mother and late father. The worst part of it -- "drudge work," Barron says -- is the floors and walls. A project this size usually exhausts her lint supply...
Then her network kicks in. Pure white lint has long been the hardest to come by (not so in the days before disposable diapers). "After Christmas is always great lint," Barron says. "People wash things for the first time. And new towels. I can always tell when the neighbors buy new towels. There's some wonderful psychic energy going on around me when people do their wash...