Press Release

Chiaroscuro gallery will host an opening reception for Tucson artist Barbara Rogers on Thursday February 7, 2008, 7-9pm. The artist will be present for the opening.

Using the metaphor of the garden, Rogers’ painting and mixed works address themes of the life cycle, of chaos and order and of landscape and abstraction. Rogers regards the garden as the fundamental pivot at which nature and culture convene and at which personal desires assume political significance.

Barbara Rogers has exhibited internationally including one person exhibitions at major galleries and museums in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Scottsdale, Germany, South Korea and most recently at an exhibition in Sharjah that was inaugurated by Sheikh Esam Al Qasimi.

The artist received her MFA in Painting from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963. She was awarded the prestigious Eisner Prize from U.C. Berkeley. In addition to her studies at U.C. Berkeley, Rogers studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute under the guidance of Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff and Frank Lobdell. Rogers studied life drawing with Nathan Oliviera at the California College of Arts and Crafts.

“Perhaps the real excitement about being an artist is that you can’t predict how your passion will translate into visual form. Every painting I begin makes it’s own demands on me. That is the wonder of making art. My memories hold all that I have seen and heard – all the colors, shapes and forms of nature and of my own life experience. When I paint, I’m an explorer in the terrain of my psyche discovering what will emerge as the work unfolds, in and out of control at the same time”

-Barbara Rogers