Stage 8 1982

Ernie Barnes made this painting called ‘Stage 8’ using thin layers of oil on canvas. I can imagine him building up this figure with repeated attempts. He’s really trying to figure something out. There's something so delicate and vulnerable about this painting: the elongated limbs, the woman with her head bowed, her arms outstretched. Is she practicing her lines or praying? I think the painting might be about the moments before a performance, when the actor is alone, somewhere between her own reality and the one she's about to inhabit. The light is incredible here. It has a strange, almost supernatural quality, a kind of radiance. Painters often make paintings about paintings, and paintings about other painters. I can see connections between Barnes’s art and the work of other figurative painters like Alice Neel. Art-making is always a conversation, across time and space.