At some point — and its arrival may not be obvious, so you have to be on the lookout for it – you have to let life please you if it will.
Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land

The body of work, Color Play, contains three related series of works: sewn fabric drawings, large woolen pieced quilts, and small linen collages on handmade paper.

This work crept up on me. I had spent years making woolen quilts using a somber palette of deep dark blues, browns, blacks, and greys. However, in 2009 things began to change. I had a new job teaching weaving to high school girls at a prep school in upstate New York. My classroom was lined with wall-to-wall shelves of every color of yarn imaginable. At first, I simply observed and celebrated my students’ color choices, but not for long. I began to see color everywhere. I was especially drawn to simple two-color juxtapositions, which I photographed during my travels and my regular commute between the United States and Canada. The photographs represent a wide spectrum of images and effects from the picturesque to the banal, from the intentionally composed to the indistinct blur. There is no hierarchy of subject matter. Using the photographs as prompts, I created simple abstract color pairings in wool and linen fabrics. Never have I experienced more pleasure in the process of making.

The resulting works have been shown in various configurations and venues, but it was the 2021 exhibition, Barbara Todd: Parallel Play, at Lake George Arts Projects, where this work first saw its full expression. Writer/photographer David Brickman called the show a smash. In his blog “Get Visual,” he describes the exhibition:

Combining miniature fabric-swatch sketches, medium-sized finished works of the same materials, and five larger quilts, Todd’s Parallel Play has been installed in three overlaying matrices of theme and variation that sing in vibrations of pure color.  At first glance, the casual viewer may not understand what Todd has going on here, and that's understandable — in all but a few of the pieces, there's nothing more to meet the eye than two juxtaposed rectangles of colored fabric, forming a perfect square on a background field of white. But Todd's persistence in this pursuit has a cumulative effect, as her tendency toward reds and yellows, greys, and blues, builds into a secret but knowable language, like semaphore. It could help to understand that every work (and there are several dozen, at least, shown here) is based on an actual experience, a sighting captured in a photograph that forms the starting point for the work. So what may appear to be simply a soft purple over a cool grey is also a specific time and place: /Morning mist, Highway I 90 near Utica, October 8, 2016/. And so on, and on. In addition to the layers of private meaning in each linen piece, there are varying textures, weaves, and mixtures of thread that make up the colors, providing a lot more to reward close inspection than one might expect. Beyond that, Todd has developed some of the selected moments into larger quilts, made of luxurious wool fabric, which are warm and inviting, even while still having been built upon cool, color-theory bones. These five works are the stars of the show, but the overall installation glows brightest. See it if you can.

Photography: Mark Van Wormer