Barrington’s
artistic career began shortly after high school at Newark School
of Fine and
Industrial Arts where he studied interior design. In the process he developed
a love for the clean lines of modernist interiors. Always an excellent
craftsman,
he began painting brightly colored, geometric supergraphics on walls of homes
in the Ocean Grove and Asbury Park community When he moved from New
Jersey
to Boston in 1971, he turned his attention to furniture creation. He expressed
his love affair with wood in thick slabs of natural pine glazed with
heavy
coats of polyurethane and turned into coffee and dining tables. He also experimented
with chairs made from whiskey barrels and used wire spools, applying
his skillful
hands and eyes to any wood with character, preferring weathered boards with
history and character. The organic shapes of his bark-bordered surfaces
united
the whimsical curves of 1950s modern décor with the back to nature fervor
of 1970s counterculture.
Unfortunately,
by 1977, he had developed rheumatoid arthritis. He and his wife Virginia married
in 1978 and moved to Brown County, Indiana, where, in 1980 their daughter
Anna Sycamore was born. Realizing that his days as a professional wood worker
were over due to his health, in order to contribute to his family’s livelihood,
Barrington returned to school, to study computer science. In 1983, the family
moved from Indiana to Florida. Since 1986 he has worked as a computer specialist,
continuing to study as personal computers increased exponentially in their
capacity to generate color and shapes of dazzling intricacy. Along the way,
he realized the computer’s potential as a tool for art.
His approach
to “painting” with the computer brings the eye of a boy who grew up worshipping
the abstractions of the modernists to the incredible magic of computer-generated
imagery. Though many digital artists begin with photographs, Barrington usually
begins with the blank screen and the wealth of powerful computerized tools
and color. In all his work, a passion for brilliant color and mesmerizing
design combine in creations of startling originality. Often the embyo of one
piece is in a small patch sliced from an earlier one.
His most
recent paintings have moved away from the flat space of abstract expressionism
to a more dimensional quality, often displaying literal focal points where
shapes seem to vanish. Forms repeat and fold into each other, shaded as though
cast in bright, intergalactic light. Sometimes they seem almost literally
extraterrestrial; others they seem beyond the cosmos itself. Where many earlier
works shunned any single focus, allowing the viewer to get lost in the meanderings
of color across the picture plane, these organize around a center. Yet these
most recent works share with those of the worm hole series, the theme of distant
spaces and infinite possibility. Their otherworldliness may evoke thoughts
of science fiction, but it invites a deeper meditation on the vastness of
reality and the workings of the forces of nature. Those physical laws, the
same for his beloved trees and wood as for planets and asteroids and even
for the pixels on his screen, ultimately underlie all creativity, prodding
the artist toward shapes that perpetually echo their elegant orchestrations.
Just as every creature’s present form evolved from its past, shaped by the
laws of nature, each image emerges through stages, its final shape emerging
kaleidoscopically from the chrysalis of its inception.