Bio:
Barbara Paris is an American painter, art teacher and multi-media artist, born in New York City of a Jewish father and a Armenian mother. Her early years were filled with a family that surrounded and nurtured her. Bolstered by her parents encouragement, she left home in order to pursue her interest in art. Barbara Paris graduated from UMASS with a dual major in fine Arts and art education.
Drawing on personal experiences, including raising kids,being a single mom,and teaching. Barbara’s works are often characterized by inspiration. She insist: “I paint with absolutely no preplanned objective or agenda, and I am always able to convey that inspiration.”
While her career was filled with success – her private life was not. Her marriage was tumultuous and ended. Her life changed dramatically, and like so many single working mothers, Barbara would have to leave the house for work early, before her elementary kids were out of bed. Her workday was filled with pain and concern about her children, getting themselves up and ready for school all on their own, no mother to give them a smile or word on encouragement or a kiss goodby as they headed out the door. After working 16 hours a day she often found herself wake up with paint on her hands, arms, or legs. Helping her to stay sane and able to handle the struggles of the days was her art.
In her art collection titled: “A bullet, A heart……a bullet takes on a different perspective. In all things there is good and there is bad, I trust in duality. Sometimes love feels like hate with a bruise, driving me to seek to understand and allow my instincts to direct me. Just as our mind and body knows what it needs when we trust. My art has become an extension of this process of seeking, of direction, of trust – and particularly in things that are otherwise overlooked. I am simply a tool being directed by instincts.”
Barbara Paris work can be found in many public and private art collections In her work she reproduces familiar visual shapes and signs, arranging them into new conceptually layered pieces with the focus on our pursuit of peace and calm in contrast to the chaos or lack of tranquility. As paint drips down the canvas she allows it to have a plan of its own causing an abstract condition of peace the painting seeks to define.
Barbara’s paintings can be purchased at her Studio in Austin, Texas.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).