Painter brings sharp eye for light, life to Pittsfield’s Hancock Shaker Village

THE BOSTON GLOBE

By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent, August 28, 2019

Channeled Light

PITTSFIELD — Watercolors capture light like no other medium, so it’s easy for a skilled artist to paint something shimmery that goes down like penny candy — brief, sweet, and forgettable.

Barbara Ernst Prey has deeper concerns. In 2017, she painted a monumental image of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art’s new wing. “Borrowed Light,” her exhibition now at Hancock Shaker Village, spotlights the work, design principles, and spirituality of the Shakers.

The religious sect settled in the Berkshires in 1780, building a community based on racial and gender equality, sustainability, and pacifism. They expressed their ideals in spare, harmonious designs. The architecture at this living history museum includes a round stone barn, home to the community’s economical systems for farm work such as milking cows. In “Wood Work,” Prey depicts the barn’s hub with the same scrupulous attention to structure, texture, and interior light that she employed at Mass MoCA.

Her attention to windows in this show recalls Vermeer. These paintings are quietly luminous and anchored in the everyday. “Spindles” captures the late afternoon splash of light from a window onto shelves full of yarn — ocher, crimson, indigo, spooled and in hanks. They glow and throw honeyed shadows.

In pieces such as “Spindles” and “Channeled Light,” in which slanting sunlight pours through a window onto a bucket and wash basin, the artist nods to Shaker women’s work. Prey’s composition, like Shaker designs, finds grace in ordinary tasks. The light, cut by diagonal shadows, draws the eye to the basin as if it were a fount. The wall behind it, worn and discolored, has a scruffy incandescence. Light and color were intrinsic to the Shakers’ expression of the sacred.

You can stroll around Hancock Shaker Village to see the sites Prey has painted. At the hour I visited, sunlight did not bathe the yarn shelves. I might not have even noticed them. But it’s a painter’s job to notice, and to draw out the nuance and light in what the rest of us ignore. Prey has that eye and that hand, and like the Shakers, what she makes touches the divine and has staying power.

Read on bostonglobe.com

Barbara Prey's Video with News Center Maine

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The Story Behind the World’s Largest Watercolor Painting

By Jennifer Nalewicki

smithsonian.com
June 22, 2017

The massive artwork marks the opening of the MASS MoCA’s new 130,000-square-foot wing, which makes it the largest contemporary art museum in the U.S.

Watercolors are among the least forgiving mediums for artists to work with. Not only are they relatively transparent, runny and overall precarious, but mistakes like an errant brushstroke are often difficult to cover up. Still, when the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) approached celebrated contemporary painter Barbara Prey about creating what would become the largest known watercolor painting in the world to celebrate the opening of Building 6, its newest wing located in North Adams, Massachusetts, she was up for the challenge.

Over the years, numerous government agencies and institutions have tapped the Fulbright Scholar to take on significant art projects—including the White House, where Prey is one of only two living female artists to have their work on display in its permanent collection (she also designed its Christmas card in 2003), and NASA, which commissioned her to create four paintings.

In other words, Prey is no stranger to completing high-profile art projects. For MASS MoCA, it took her about a year from start to finish to complete the massive watercolor painting, which measures 8 feet by 15 feet, or 120 square feet, and is a detailed replica of the second floor of Building 6, a former textile mill, as it looked before renovations began to transform it into a museum.

The finished piece includes painted facsimiles of the sprawling building’s columns, windows and endless layers of paint. But bringing the painting to life was the easy part. It was gathering the materials to start the project in the first place that proved to be the most difficult.

Building 6 Portrait: Interior, Barbara Ernst Prey, 2015-2017

Prey wound up doing much of her work onsite in Building 6 before renovations commenced, studying the space’s light throughout the day, while also reading up on its history as one of many mills that made up the industrial town.“I spent a lot of time in the building, doing about 48 sketches using pencils to larger color studies,” she says. “I would go back and forth and compare paint chips, and I would sit on the floor doing color studies of the columns. It’s a very mystical and magical space, but also dirty and gritty with dust on the floor. But that sense of space I couldn’t have gotten without working there.”

 In a move to help solidify a connection between building and painting, Prey incorporated dust from the floor as well as ground paint chips from the columns by adding them into her paint, lending a mixed-media element to the work.

“That created a real connection with the building,” she says. “I also had to make sure that I got all of the lines straight, since this had to be a portrait of the space.”Prey’s piece is the first thing visitors will see before entering MASS MoCA’s new wing. It’s on display along with select works by artists James Turrell, Robert Rauschenberg, Jenny Holzer, Louise Bourgeois, Laurie Anderson and Sol Lewitt. With the recent addition of roughly 130,000-square-feet of gallery space, MASS MoCA is now the largest contemporary art museum in the United States.

A Physical Connection

Barbara Ernst Prey ’79—whose watercolor paintings hang in private and public collections including the White House and NASA headquarters—was commissioned to paint Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts’ Building 6 ahead of its opening this month. The painting, which depicts the interior of the building before it was renovated into gallery space, measures 9 by 16 feet, making it one of the largest watercolor paintings in the world.

“The biggest challenge was finding big enough paper,” says Prey, who eventually found high quality paper stock in England that came in huge rolls. She mounted three panels onto a wood base in order to create a working surface that would not warp with either the humidity in Williamstown—where she painted the piece over the last nine months—or the paint itself. In order to minimize dripping, which can’t be hidden or painted over in watercolor, Prey leaned the mounted paper at a slight angle as she worked in her studio. “If you look closely, you can see a few drips,” Prey says.

The project was a homecoming for the artist, who studied art history and Baroque architecture under long-time art professor S. Lane Faison Jr. ’29. Prey says Faison continued to mentor her after she graduated from Williams. “I visited Lane once, and he said he wanted to show me something,” Prey says. “He took me inside the old Sprague electric building—which was completely empty—and said ‘Just look at this space.’” The pair that had studied and written together about German Baroque architecture couldn’t get enough of the old factory building, imagining what it would become.

Of course, it became MASS MoCA, one of the largest museums of contemporary art in the country. “Being asked to return to MASS MoCA to paint the interior of this building, after studying art and architecture with Lane, who was the first person to show me the building, feels like a wonderful coming together of all the threads of my life,” Prey says.

Most of Prey’s work is based on plein air color studies and sketching, but she says she felt at home working inside MASS MoCA from the very beginning. “A year before I started painting, I spent long winter afternoons inside the building, shivering because there was no heat, and doing color studies of the space,” she says. “I collected chips from the peeling paint on the columns and mixed those into my own paints, so the piece has a physical connection to the space it hangs in.”

Prey, who received a 2008 presidential appointment to the National Council  on the Arts, the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Art, says, “The painting is a piece of art in itself. But it is also a means of supporting the arts in the Berkshires, because MASS MoCA is an anchor in this community.”

Building 6 opens May 29 and features work from artists Laurie Anderson, Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Gunnar Schonbeck, Robert Rauschenberg and James Turrell. Prey’s painting will hang in the entryway of the second floor, where it will help visitors imagine how the space looked before it was renovated.

“The architecture, the light, the colors and the different textures of the space in Building 6 are all compelling subjects,” Prey says. “This piece pushed my boundaries as an artist, opening up new perspectives on watercolor painting.”

Read more about the opening of Building 6 and Prey’s artwork.

williams.edu

This Watercolorist Thinks Big

by John Seven, August 22, 2017

Barbara Ernst Prey super-sizes watercolor, a medium often reserved for smaller works, for MassMoCA’s new wing Building 6. 

When Mass MoCA asked watercolorist Barbara Ernst Prey to capture on canvas the pre-renovation state of its new wing, Building 6, for the space’s opening, Prey thought such a big event deserved a painting of equal magnitude. The result is her largest work to date, 8 feet by 15 feet, taking a year and a half to complete.

It’s certainly huge, but the work is just as much about her relationship with Mass MoCA. In her student days at Williams College, where she is currently an adjunct professor, her teacher and mentor, S. Lane Faison, took her on a tour of the space that would become the museum, which Prey now sees as bringing her full circle.

“I really wanted to stretch the watercolor medium, take it in a whole new direction because no one’s done this,” Prey says, “but I was really interested in the space because I had a personal connection, and I think that comes out in the painting. It’s not just coming and doing a commission. It’s something where I lived there, I spent a lot of time in the building looking at the space, thinking about the space. I was there in my down jacket when it was dusty and dirty, and I would come out with dust all over me.”

Pencil study for final work, 5″ X 10″, Barbara Ernst Prey

Prey grew up in an art studio. Her mother was head of the Pratt Institute design department and Prey started painting as a small child alongside her mother. She’s since had work commissioned by NASA and for the 2003 White House Christmas card, but the Building 6 painting truly kept her on her feet, both figuratively and literally.

“You’re up and down,” she says. “I always like to step back and see. That’s my process—go back and see how it integrates with the whole. I’m painting something that is a defined space, but my painting is really abstract going into the structure so I’m always comparing different parts of the painting and going back and going up and down. Very aerobic.”

This came after a significant time just planning the work, which the scope of the work demanded. Merely tracking down a source for oversized watercolor paper took time and Prey had to figure out positioning such a large piece at an angle to prevent drips, while at the same time working from a ladder and scaffolding.

Prey working at the studio

Working on details

Prey started the process with nearly 50 on-site color studies. She continued work in her New York studio but moved everything to her Williamstown studio to be physically closer to the space. The final work also features experimentation of material not often found in watercolors—dust, dirt, and paint chips from the space embedded in the painting.

Though the work was daunting in the beginning Prey is pleased with the outcome, so much so that she’s not inclined to think small if she doesn’t have to. “It was actually pretty scary,” she says. “When you’re looking at this huge white piece of paper and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, how in the world am I going to pull this off, how is this going to work?’ Then you just dive in and work and work. I want to continue large. I feel like I can do this, whereas in the beginning I thought, ‘How do I do this?’”

The World’s Largest Watercolor Goes on Display at MASS MoCA

VICE

by Andrew Nunes

— Barbara Ernst Prey’s gigantic painting is on view at the North Adams institution.

MASS MoCA just unveiled Building 6, a massive addition of 130,000 square feet of exhibition space, and to inaugurate the new wing, more than a dozen exhibitions by a powerful array of blue chip artists are on display, one of which is something of a meta-show. Barbara Ernst Prey‘s Building 6 Portrait: Interior consists of a singular work—a giant, framed, 8′ x 15′ watercolor painting depicting the pre-renovation version of the same space the piece is housed in.

An unusual (but quite interesting) commission to say the least, the painting is something of a cultural preservation of an older America. “Building 6 had been vacant since the early 1980s. It has seen so much use as a bustling epicenter to American industrialism, yet when I did a walkthrough of the empty space with MASS MoCA director Joseph Thompson in September 2015, you could hear a pin drop,” Prey tells Creators. “The eerie silence of the cavernous space combined with the way the natural light hit it was otherworldly. Before it was to be repurposed again, I wanted to capture that ethereality, and the best way to do that was by using the dreamy, delicate-yet-technical medium of watercolor painting.

MASS MoCA Building 6, installed

Prey’s painting, the result of a two-year endeavor beginning in 2015, is also notable for a variety of reasons beyond offering a historical slice of an iconic building. For starters, Building 6 Portrait: Interior is quite literally the largest-known watercolor painting ever created in terms of total square footage. Its sheer size is more than just visual grandeur; it’s also an incredibly technically challenging feat to accomplish, considering how watercolor dries much quicker than other forms of painting, and how mistakes are near-impossible to cover up in this particular medium.

Historical photo of Building 6 Courtesy of MASS MoCA

This is precisely the reason why the painting took Prey such a long amount of time to complete. In order to fully attune herself with the space and the painting to-be-made, the artist embarked on a long series of spatial studies of the disused building, before creating an initial structure drawing of the space, a process which, in itself, took an incredibly long time.

“Once MASS MoCA commissioned me, I was granted a few months to be able to spend time alone in the empty building to create these on-site studies,” Prey explains. “I wanted to capture how the light hit the industrial beauty of the building’s architecture, combined with the sheer emptiness of this formerly bustling factory hub. One can only imagine the constant mechanical and conversational cacophony it housed for two centuries.”

Painting in the studio

“My approach to painting has always had an extremely technical core, but with an interpretive, site-specific execution. So, in this case, I did 48 advance studies and a to-scale base sketch with perspectival accuracy, but executed the work itself in varied layers of watercolor washes with paint chips and site debris mixed in,” she adds.

Even Prey’s initial studies involved a multiple-step process. “I initially began with small studies working out the composition and value and, in this commission, choosing which view I would paint of the vast un-renovated space,” the artist reveals. “After the pencil drawings, I moved to color studies. They began small, as I was unsure of the saturation of the color, and then I moved to larger studies. The last study was 32×40″, which is tacked up on the wall as a reference for the final painting.”

Detail of Building 6 Portrait: Interior, Barbara Ernst Prey, 2015-2017

Beyond the cultural significance of the work, the whole process was something of a spiritual journey for Prey. “On a personal level, this was all about exploring uncharted territory. But perhaps the most important thing to remember was that I really couldn’t make a mistake, which is the scary part about watercolor. It is the most unforgiving medium, and working in it on such a grand scale was an endurance-based process.”

Maine artist makes what may be the world’s largest watercolor

BY BOB KEYES STAFF WRITER

PORT CLYDE — Barbara Prey has a golden resume: a bachelor’s degree from Williams College, a master’s from Harvard and a Fulbright scholarship, which she used to study baroque art and architecture in Germany. One of her first jobs was drawing illustrations for the New Yorker.

Her watercolors have been used for two White House Christmas cards, and her paintings are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Brooklyn Museum and hang in U.S. embassies around the world.

Barbara Prey’s studies of her painting, which was commissioned by MASS MoCA, are on display in Port Clyde.

IF YOU GO

BARBARA PREY: “MASS MoCA: STUDIES FROM A MUSEUM COMMISSION”

WHERE: Barbara Prey Projects, 855 Main St., Port Clyde

WHEN: Through Sept. 20; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily

INFORMATION:barbarapreyprojects.com or 372-8087

Barbara Prey in her studio in Port Clyde next to studies of her painting that is now hanging at The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Staff photo by Shawn Patrick Ouellette

But for all her accomplishments, Prey, who lives part of the year in Maine, has lacked an enthusiastic endorsement from a leading contemporary art museum. That changed recently, when the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams commissioned her to make what the museum believes is the largest existing watercolor painting.

MASS MoCA, the country’s largest contemporary art museum, after its recent expansion, and a taste-maker in contemporary art since it opened in 1999, challenged Prey, a landscape painter in the tradition of Andrew Wyeth, to make a large-scale painting showing the museum’s new home in a former mill complex before a renovation and expansion added 120,000 square feet. The museum wanted to document the mill while the patina of the peeling paint and unfinished wood floors were intact.

“MASS MoCA Building 6” in part reveals artist Barbara Prey’s interest in architecture, which has surfaced throughout her career. Image courtesy of MASS MoCA

Prey gave them “MASS MoCA Building 6,” which preserves the former factory in its raw state, with dusty floors and red-brick walls. Unframed, the painting is 8-by-15 feet. Prey used three 8-by-5 sheets of paper. Framed, it’s a foot larger in each dimension and weighs about 300 pounds.

If there are bigger watercolor paintings out there, the museum can’t find them, said director Joe Thompson.

“We think it may well be (the largest), but it’s very hard to pin that down with any kind of certainty,” he said. “We can’t come up with any bigger, but I don’t know that was necessarily a goal, either. We talked about creating a watercolor that makes you feel like you are in the space that’s being depicted.”

Prey at work. Framed, “MASS MoCA Building 6” weighs about 300 pounds. Photos courtesy of MASS MoCA

Thompson suggested the project to Prey, because of his personal admiration of watercolorists who “achieve a frictionless ease” in their paintings, and he puts Prey at the top of his list. At a Berkshires cocktail party a few years ago, he challenged her to blow up the scale and try something really big. “I asked her almost as a coy joke, and she just sort of laughed. As is her way, she leapt at the challenge,” Thompson said.

She proposed an interior portrait of the building, drawing on her interest in architecture that began in college and has resurfaced throughout her career, including in a series of interiors of Maine meetinghouses that she did after Sept. 11.

As old New England mills are, the space is huge. The second floor, on which the painting is based, is more than an acre, with 400 columns and hundreds of windows. There are layers of paint and decades of grime. It was a textile mill and an electronic component plant before becoming a cultural destination.

The painting was unveiled when the new space opened in the spring and is hanging in the prowlike atrium of the new Robert W. Wilson Building, along with art by leading contemporary women artists Jenny Holzer, Louise Bourgeois and Laurie Anderson.

While the large-scale original will hang for up to three years in Massachusetts, Prey is showing a dozen pencil drawings and watercolor sketches of the MASS MoCA commission through Sept. 20 at her gallery in Port Clyde, along with the colorful, representational paintings of the Maine coast that have made her popular with presidents, actors and everyday Mainers. One of the paintings on view in Maine is her final study for the interior mill space, about 24-by-40 inches.

A column study of the mill space.

The horizontal painting shows the empty mill, floor to ceiling, looking between two rows of descending columns, which dwindle in size and create the perspective of a vast, open plain of space. Windows along the brick walls flood the surface with light. Her biggest challenge was keeping plumb the drawn lines of the windows and columns to achieve the perspective of looking through space.

Because of the fragility of watercolors, MASS MoCA is committing to a three-year exhibition, Thompson said, and even that duration might be risky given the light-filled nature of the space where it is mounted. “Barbara was very brave to allow us to show it where we are,” he said. “We will monitor it and see how it holds up from a conservation point of view.”

Prey, who has been painting more than four decades, witnessed the transformation of the mill from the time she was a student at Williams College in nearby Williamstown. She has stayed connected to the community as an adjust faculty member at Williams and by maintaining a studio in Williamstown.

It was there she did most of the work on the painting, because the proximity allowed her to travel between her studio and museum during the renovation to sketch, monitor the light and check other details of the space as it was being transformed. “It was disappearing as I was painting it,” she said.

Watercolor light study.

Prey worked on the MASS MoCA project for about two years, though most of the first year was spent figuring out what she would do and how to do it. “The whole process is ground-breaking and sort of new,” she said. “There was not a model that I could follow or a prototype to look at. People have done large watercolors, but they say this is the largest.”

Her early research was technical – where to buy paper for a painting this large, what kind of paint to use, what kind of brushes. After sketching and drawing, she spent six to eight months painting, first at her studio on Long Island, New York, where she lives most of the year and returned to after leaving Maine last fall, and later in western Massachusetts, where she spent most of the winter and spring. She completed the painting in April.

To make a detailed painting so large, she treated it as a series of small paintings, concentrating on a section at a time. Because watercolors are unforgiving and dry quickly, she had to plan and test nearly every aspect of the painting ahead of time. She made several mistakes. She used a shade of red for her bricks that brought unexpected results. Early on, she represented the wood floor by drawing lines, and later changed her mind. And on her final day of painting – one of her final acts – she knocked over a jar of brushes and water, spilling both from her scaffolding onto a section of the paper’s finished surface, discoloring it and gouging it.

A pencil study of the old mill which, once renovated and expanded, became the new home to MASS MoCA. The second floor, on which Prey’s painting is based, is more than an acre in size, with 400 columns and hundreds of windows.

She was able to fix each of those errors – by quickly brushing out the offending red, spending three days erasing the lines on the floor and blotting the water and brush marks before they dried.

Prey has operated a gallery on the St. George peninsula every summer for most of 40 years, usually featuring her colorful, representational watercolors of the region’s shingled homes, rugged dories and stout spruce trees. With her work, she attempts to capture the evolving culture of Port Clyde and the surrounding fishing communities, by observing and recording. She does much the same with her painting at the mill.

Prey, 60, is thrilled be a part of the contemporary art conversation and hopes “MASS MoCA Building 6” elevates her stature from a successful watercolor painter to an influential one. Having one of her pieces on view alongside Jenny Holzer, Robert Rauschenberg and other heavyweights of contemporary art can only help, she said.

“This is what I am meant to be doing. You want to have your own voice, your own story and your own style, and this is a great opportunity to take watercolor in a new direction,” she said. “It contextualizes my work with a handful of very well-known, cutting-edge contemporary artists. To be included in that group is really exciting.”

Portland Press Herald: Prey's paintings from her world travels are on view

'On Site: Barbara Ernst Prey Travelogues' will be shown in Port Clyde through Sept. 5.

Gordes, 2015, Watercolor on paper

Barbara Prey Projects on Main Street in Port Clyde is opening a new exhibition, “On Site: Barbara Ernst Prey’s Travelogues,” a selection of travel paintings from Europe, Asia and South America that haven’t been seen before.

The exhibit will open Tuesday and run through Sept. 5 in the upstairs gallery.

A press release about the exhibit says it brings together unique reflections and memories of the world seen through Prey’s eyes – works that reveal her intense study and examination of different cultural and art historical heritages.

She spent four years in Europe studying the lines of early Renaissance drawings, Gothic sculptures and architectural sketches. Upon returning in the early 1980s, her artwork was published in The New Yorker and other magazines for over 10 years.

Prey is always looking for new sites to work en plein air. Recent travels have taken her to France, Switzerland and Peru. The work featured in the exhibit includes a picturesque row of houses in a French village, snow covered Swiss mountains and colorful cityscapes of the Peruvian Andes.

Prey, widely considered a key figure of 21st century landscape painting, is a member of the National Council on the Arts, the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Arts.

For more information, call 372-8087 or go to barbarapreyprojects.com.

Portland Press Herald

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A Colorful Life: Barbara Prey paints landscapes that reflect both an inner and outer world

AMERICAN ARTS QUARTERLY May 2016

 by David Masello

White Wash, 2014, 22 x 30 inches

The moment Barbara Ernst Prey applies a brushstroke to paper, the swath of color she leaves behind is something simultaneously both brand new and old. “I paint every day with my mother’s brushes,” the artist says from her bright third-floor studio in the turret of a Victorian house on Long Island’s North Shore. “My mother was head of the design department at Pratt (Institute) and she knew to take very good care of her brushes. I really can honestly say that I feel her spirit in them. We would often paint together, en plein air especially, and those brushes I watched her work with, I now work with.”

Prey’s brushes are always in action, especially as she applies watercolors to large surfaces of paper—the medium for which she is best known. Prey may be one of America’s most visible artists, in that her work is shown not only in galleries and museums, embassies and presidential libraries on earth, but also, in a way, in outer space. Among her vast palette of awards and accolades, Prey was commissioned by NASA to execute paintings for their permanent collection—ones that virtually redefine life on this planet. Her depiction of the Columbia astronauts who perished in the disaster in 2003, along with works showing the international space station and the shuttle Discovery are part of the NASA Art Program tradition, one in which Norman Rockwell and Robert Rauschenberg were also invited and participated.

There are few artists working today of whom people ask for their autograph, but Prey is one of them. And she is used to being among the well known and well-pedigreed (collectors of her work include members of the Mellon, Rockefeller and Phipps families). President George Bush commissioned her to paint the official White House Christmas card and when Prey was only seventeen, she sold two works to then New York Governor Hugh Carey. Her paintings, chiefly landscapes, which she insists “hover between representation and abstraction,” are decidedly accessible and beautiful, certainly the best attributes of any good representational art. When asked why her typical large-scale scenes stand out from other artists who might paint similar scenes—rowboats bobbing in a harbor, winter sunsets in Maine, the interiors of New England meeting houses coursed by beams of sunlight, American vernacular houses on country roads, marshlands, fields ablaze with autumnal color—Prey says, matter-of-factly, “I like to think my work is really good. I’ve been described as an artist’s artist, though I know I wouldn’t be regarded as that were it not for my mother. She had such high standards for her art. I grew up in such an artistic home, with my mother hanging reproductions all over and taking me to all of the museums. I wouldn’t be the artist I am today without those experiences. My mom really helped inform my vocabulary.”

But still, Prey’s fame and sheer popularity as an artist derives from other traits, too, the chief one being her use of color. While watercolors are often noted for their muted cast on paper, Prey’s works dazzle with color, as if she is some kind of alchemist of the medium, able to transform a particular hue into a bolder, deeper, almost three-dimensional version of itself. “My work is all about color,” she admits. “Color speaks to your soul. No one else does what I do, which is use a saturation of color. I’ll labor on a work, applying layers and layers—not only of color, but also meaning.”

Indeed, the hues of a patchwork quilt drying on the line in her White Wash, the blocks of colors of grasses fronting the lighthouse in Quadricentennial and the cobalt water and bright yellows of her Bonfire are so dense with hue that the works verge on becoming something unreal, not of this world, yet they remain rooted in reality. “I’m always pushing with the colors,” says Prey, “but also taking on traditions and staying true to them, akin to Winslow Homer.” She recalls an early admiration for the works of Maxfield Parrish, a colorist extraordinaire. “But when I really started looking at his works up close, I thought, no, the colors can be too strong. Of course, he was an illustrator, too, and that’s the reason for some of his overuse of color.”

Meeting House, 2012 21 x 28 inches

As for her preferred medium of watercolors, Prey admits, “My mother painted in oils and she was so good with them that when I was about seventeen years old, I realized that there was no way I could compete with her. So, I took to watercolors.” Prey says that watercolors appeal to her, too, because they require a certain ceding of painterly control. “You have to be a little bit of a free spirit because you can’t control watercolors. But you do have to know where it is all to go at the end, what it is you want to paint and convey.”

Bonfire, 2014, 28 x 40 inches

Prey works everywhere she goes—in her home studio in Oyster Bay, Long Island (a rambling house built by Theodore Roosevelt), at another property in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she also teaches as an adjunct professor at Williams College, and at yet another in Port Clyde, Maine, where she recently purchased Blue Water Fine Arts, a venerable arts space that had begun its life as a village inn there. The old frame building had been owned for years by Paige Rense, the former editor in chief of Architectural Digest and her (late) husband, the painter Kenneth Noland. Prey has transformed it into Barbara Prey Projects, a cultural space in which she will showcase her works during summer months (the season debuts with a two-week-long exhibition of Prey’s, opening July 1).

Prey learned early on to paint and draw wherever inspiration struck and where material presented itself. Soon after she graduated from Williams College and, later, Harvard University where she earned a masters degree, Prey did freelance work for the New Yorker magazine, churning out scores of the small black-and-white line drawings that still appear on the pages of the magazine. She would bicycle around Manhattan and when struck by a particular scene or object, would stop and sit on a park bench or perch in a plaza to render a spot drawing. Her subjects might include roosting pigeons or a bubbling fountain or a subway entrance. “I would draw and then ride my bike with my finished works right to the magazine’s office and just drop them off. They’re putting together an archive of them now. I didn’t know at the time how lucky I was to be able to have that kind of relationship with the magazine and to be an artist whose work gets published right after it’s done.”

Shades of Blue, 2014, 28 x 40 inches

Prey admits to preferring to work, whenever possible, en plein air. “That’s when you really see the colors around you and you get a full sense of the story of the subject. You can assume a dialogue with your subject that work in a studio doesn’t allow.” When at her Williamstown studio, it is not uncommon to find Prey perched atop Stone Hill on the grounds of the Clark Art Museum as she paints details of the surrounding Berkshires, sometimes accompanied by her students at their easels. “I love teaching. You learn so much as you see things through their eyes.” She adds, “I am a painter inspired by landscape and that is my context. I don’t just go out and paint a sunset to paint a sunset,” she says, referring to Field of Dreams. “I had been seeing this sunset in this Maine locale for ten years, but it took that long for me to suddenly understand the composition I wanted to capture.”

While her paintings include an uncanny poetic sense of detail and narrative, people rarely make an appearance in the scenes, unless it is a portrait (she recently completed a portrait of James Watson, a Nobel Laureate, in addition to having done a number of commissioned portraits of European princes, notably the Lobkowicz family). The pews in her Meeting House are empty. The roadway in Beyond the Rise contains no pedestrians or residents on the porches. Fishermen are absent from their boats in her Shades of Blue. The lights are on in the houses in Early Risers, but no one is seen at the windows. “I don’t put people in because I want you, the viewer, to put yourself in the picture,” she says, in what might best be considered a generous painterly invitation. “A person in the scene suddenly makes the picture static. It stops the picture. To see people in the boats would be to write a sentence that just ends.”