About

Susan Barnett’s background in cognitive and clinical psychology have long influenced her pattern-based paintings that use color and composition to influence the viewer’s perception of shapes and the way they emerge from background to foreground and vice versa. Building on those explorations, the paintings in The Wave and the Water employ mandalas, circular paintings intended to represent the entire cosmos, to function both as paintings and meditative objects.

Though not mandalas in the strict sense of using Buddhist or Hindu iconography, each painting has a physical three-dimensional presence …