Art

Item Description

This painting is number 51 in a series of 225 and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticty. Dimensions are approximately 2 1/2 feet high by 3 1/2 feet wide.

Artist Profile
Barbara McCann was born and raised in western Pennsylvania, in the rural environs of Newcastle. She began her artistic endeavors with drawing as a child, and then with painting in her teenage years. Upon graduating from high school, she took a four-year apprenticeship in architectural illustration and design, which set the stage for a career in commercial art. McCann moved to Florida in 1973, and for the next 20 years ran her own architectural illustration studio.

McCann's career and interests in commercial and fine art dovetailed. While maintaining her business, McCann explored a variety of mediums and methodologies for landscape and portrait painting. In the early to late seventies, she studied oils with acclaimed figure painter Marilyn Bendell. While under Bendell's tutelage, McCann discovered the works of Nicola Simbari, an Italian artist whose vision and style has been an enduring inspiration for her.

Morning Light, serigrah
In the late seventies, McCann worked to develop a more fluid, translucent presentation in her art. At Bendell's suggestion, she took up watercolors, studying with renowned artists Valfred Thelin and Charles Reid. She melded her fine art talents with her commercial work by painting architectural renderings in watercolors, which caused a sensation among her clients. In the mid-eighties, McCann returned to oils as the primary medium for her noncommercial art, utilizing watercolors solely for sketches of landscapes and people.

McCann's skills in art and architectural illustration led to a decade-long relationship as an instructor with the Ringling College of Art & Design. From 1983 to 1993, she taught classes in perspective drawing and illustration at the Florida college, which is rated as one of the finest art schools in the United States. She developed an approach to the intrinsically difficult study of perspective that made it comprehensible and useful to even novice artists. She is considering outlining her methods in a book.

Over the course of her career, McCann steadily expanded both her commercial and fine art clienteles. The interest in her paintings led her to establish a gallery in Sarasota, Florida, and in the early nineties she signed with a large publisher and gallery chain in the United States. Then in 1995, she secured representation with Fingerhut Group Publishers and is currently self-publishing.

Barbara McCann continues to work and live in Florida. She finds aesthetic inspiration both near and far -- from the sunny climate of her home to locales she has visited in her extensive travels over the past 20 years: the Caribbean, the West Indies, Central America, Greece, and Europe.

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