Barbara Heile’s paintings: Where she lives, what she loves

Barbara Heile’s show at the Gay Street Gallery explores where she lives and what she loves. Often the two intersect, which makes multiple visits to the gallery in the Town of Washington worthwhile.

The longtime Rappahannock painter’s work falls into a gorgeous arrangement on the walls of the gallery, thanks to owner Jay Ward Brown’s painstaking hanging, which is its own artistic composition.

Heile’s colors, particularly the reds and golds, radiate a slow joy into the room, while the shapes — triangles, rectangles and cylinders — remind a viewer that the artist is playfully remembering and recycling recognized objects and geometries from her own kitchens and windowsills.

Heile’s paintings are something of a surprise in the gallery, which was created around the work of Brown’s late husband, Kevin H. Adams, a much-loved and widely acclaimed landscape artist, whose works lent definition to Rappahannock’s particular beauty. Other representational landscape artists often show their work at the gallery. Their painting styles differ, but Heile treasures her link with Adams, who died in 2023. Said Heile: “I painted this year inspired by my connection to Kevin, and by his encouragement to come further out into the world, a world that he knew and loved so well.”

Pure painting

The current show is about pure painting, each work celebrating the act of applying pigment to a surface. Heile employs a collage of techniques. She might mix in cold wax. She might add, then partially scratch away a color, or press a new color onto the picture plane using some hardware store object that brings a grid pattern or special texture. Several involve actual collage.

Heile doesn’t usually paint what is directly in front of her, but she does paint what she’s seen, taken in, felt or thought. Her pictures evolve in the way people do. According to Heile, they might sit unresolved and menaced by failure for months, until a clear direction takes hold. Every painting in the gallery has been stranded and uncertain at some point in the process. And each has found a way to its own destination, having safely navigated the anarchy of creation.

Heile herself, working in her woodland studio near Boston, steps into the same uncertainty with each painting. “I can paint and scribble and mark and not know what’s going on,” she said. Heile doesn’t execute a plan, but awaits instruction from the painting she’s working on. “They were so alive,” she said of the paintings on display. “I’m receiving.”

The work of heart and mind

The paintings are the work of heart and mind. The colors, she explained, often arise from within, expressing a feeling. Reds are a pulsing life force, while blues might relate to hopes or speculations. Shapes suggest recognizable forms from life or simply create the scaffolding of a new composition. Once there are some colors and shapes on the panel, the real mental work begins. “It’s arranging and arranging until you get it right,” she said. “Your mind is engaged.”

Heile’s hope is that her paintings will speak to people who don’t understand themselves as art enthusiasts. “You don’t have to know anything about paintings,” wshe said. “You just have to be open.” And whether or not a painting includes references to the external world, “you have to paint what you love,” she said, hoping that visitors will see that every painting is a love story.

A number of the paintings feature the warmth of kitchens where Heile cooked, washed the dishes, looked out the window. Her former kitchen emphasized yellow, while the present one features cayenne red. “The kitchen is where I love to be baking food,” she said. “There are the cups and saucers, the rugs from Afghanistan.”

Memories are always present. She recalls one of her three sons, all now adults living in Rappahannock, running into the kitchen with a kitten he discovered in a barn. Neither the kitten nor the little boy appear in a painting, but the moment informs the kitchen paintings nonetheless.

Where art and life meet

With Heile, art and life meet in a process of reciprocal learning, one informing the other. Cups and bowls float across her paintings like Chagall’s roosters and rabbis, while colors from her paintings swirl back into the actual kitchens, as when she painted a refrigerator a subtle wine-colored hue, to the surprise of her husband. 

Some paintings at the gallery are built around the iconography of houses and streetscapes, with rectangles and triangles communicating the presence of structures where people live. But in other paintings — such as “Inside an Open Mind” and “Room for Play” — the triangles are simply shapes set within an abstract composition. She likes working with square panels for more abstract pieces, finding that horizontal pictures often seem like landscapes, while verticals suggest portraits.

Heile has gravitated toward trees at different points in her artistic career. Often she has painted a section of the trunk closely observed and boldly placed in the center of the painting. The property where she lives and paints is surrounded by woods that are filled with mountain laurels. It is inevitable that she would compose occasional portraits of trees.

Ultimately, the paintings are less about something the artist already knows than something she is hoping to discover. She paints continually, convinced there is always more. “I’m not painting because I’m successful as a painter,” she concluded. “I’m painting because it always shows me something.”

Barbara Heile’s show runs through Jan. 14. The Gay Street Gallery is located at 337 Gay St. in the Town of Washington.

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