John A. Barry’s P6 and trAction Painting Exhibit
Curated by Bill Carmel
On Display through Early April
Opening Reception with Jazz Church West
On Sunday, March 3rd, at 5:00 pm
FivePlay Jazz Quintet with Tony Corman
John Barry with two P6 pieces in the Peace Sanctuary.
Artist Sprayment [sic] John A. Barry
Over the course of several years, I developed a couple of painting genres/techniques, both on display in this exhibit.
P6. (Projectile Precipitated Propellant Painting Performative Process). After conceiving this process, in 2022, I constructed a 4 x 4 x 4-foot frame. I cover the tops and sides of said frame with canvas and/or cardboard; the back wall is composed of particle board. The front wall is canvas with a peephole (or cardboard on which I measure and mark the position of the can and then shoot through the cardboard). I place objects I wish to paint (canvas boards, stretched canvases, clothing, furniture, etc.) inside the covered frame, call the Pigmilion (Pigment Pavilion). From its ceiling, I suspend cans of aerosol paint (one at a time) on a string stalactite. To release the pressurized paint, I shoot the cans with a pellet rifle, through the canvas peephole or the marked cardboard. Although I can exercise a little control of the spray pattern (primarily by placement of the can), the results are almost entirely stochastic (random). So some efforts turn out better than others. A small quantity of paint remains in the cans; sometimes I dribble it onto a canvas. The pellets are embedded in the particle board, which also gets painted in the process.
trAction Painting. I employ the trAction technique, created in 2011, to apply paint to large surfaces, using bikes, wheelchairs, scooters, and skates as my “brushes.” Paint flows onto each vehicle’s wheels as I propel the vehicle across a large horizontal surface. My largest trAction canvas is 20 x 12 feet. The name is a play on Action Painting, a form of Abstract Expressionism, and the need to have traction when hard plastic skate.scooter wheels meet viscous, slippery acrylic paint.
I created most of the works in this exhibit with P6, although some of them contain elements of trAction Painting. My website–focusing at this point only on trAction–is traction-painting.com.
John Barry creating a trAction painting