Tessa Barringer

Despite a long career as a high school English teacher, Tessa Barringer always loved drawing and over the years attended a multitude of night classes, workshops, and summer schools.

Eventually in 2010 she gave serious time to the dream and took a year off to complete a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Arts at the Otago Polytechnic School of Art, and then, in 2015, took early retirement to finally and fully concentrate on her art.

Tessa's early interests was in life drawing and portraiture - fascinated by trying to evoke not only likeness but also the dynamics of interaction,but finding "people  complex beasts to deal with" she found herself drifting through landscape, skyscape and lots of very detailed observational drawing before finally settling on birds.

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"The bird table outside my studio door is now the heart of my practice; a tiny stage, reset each morning and the performers invited in to improvise and entertain. The frame for the action remains the same but the script is constantly changing. The stage sets often reference traditional still life but not nature morte; rather these pieces are life held still for an instant only. Each work becomes a sanctuary of sorts, a space in which the headlong rush of time is paused, layered and polished with days, weeks, even months of slow detailed attention to colour, light, texture and form".

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