All creative art must rise out of a specific soil and flicker with the spirit of place. –D.H. Lawrence

Scrawled on a slip of paper taped to the wall of Hayley Barker’s Los Angeles studio are the words: does it vibrate? The question recalls the artistic quality that poet and novelist D.H. Lawrence identified as a mysterious “shiftiness” or a living “shimmeriness.” For Lawrence, paintings capable of animating life’s reverberating energies, or shifti-shimmeriness, roused the viewer’s deepest emotional self and restored their relationship to the environment. He understood the artist as someone who “felt the life of the land in their blood” and knew how to honor the material forms of ferns, apples, rocks, and streams, as well as the invisible stirrings of earth’s enduring mysteries.

Barker’s chimerical garden landscapes realize Lawrence’s visionary ideal. Translating the energy of the green, tangerine, lilac, cerise, and aquamarine world into rhythmic interplays of color and form, detail and gesture, light and shade, Barker makes from life more life. Her verdant compositions, teeming with the elan vital of diaphanous grasses, lacy petals, and succulent citrus fruits, compel viewers to stop and rest awhile. As musical tones make nearby objects vibrate at the same frequency, the tender thrumming emanating from Barker’s pictorial worlds encourages reciprocal harmony. The pervasive sense of benevolence and serenity is bewitching.

Where true-to-life cobblestone paths unfurl toward dandelion moons or sudden clearings emerge from lush copses, it’s tempting to venture inside the frame and through the garden gate. Taken together, the grandeur of their scale, the substantiality of the innumerable painted beings, and the mesmerizing conflation of surface with depth afford her compositions an illusory effect—just as the densely drawn details and intricate patterns elicit a somatic yearning to be enveloped within nature’s fecundity. The boundaries between exterior and interior, leaf and skin, the psychic and the physical, grow thin the longer you stay within Barker's world until there is a touching, a meeting, and merging. The seer is seen from the inside out.

“I want people to care about the plants and the trees as deeply as I do,” shared Barker. “My hope is for people to see themselves in my work, to experience this relationship that nurtures and comforts me.” For Barker, to tend to one tree is to tend to the fate of every tree, and to move one person toward care is to move everyone toward caring for the lives of more-than-human beings. “Plants, animals, rocks, it’s all held together by a universal energy that's mysterious and chaotic,” said Barker. “Everything is itself, and everything is connected.”

Barker’s intimate relationship with nature can be traced back to her childhood in the Pacific Northwest. Surrounded by Oregon’s abundant forests, lakes, rivers, and mountain ranges, Barker grew up with an innate and indiscriminate reverence for the natural world. Countless hours spent playing in the dirt with pebbles and pillbugs engendered the young artist's attentive perception and penetrating intuition. “I was probably three when I recognized that all things, including rocks and bugs, were similarly alive,” recalled Barker, who still delights in digging in the earth and collecting crystals. “I think what we discover about ourselves as children is often a reflection of our truest self.”

At 50, Barker is undeniably living in harmony with her younger self. She currently divides her time between capturing the ever-shifting patterns of sunlight in her efflorescent yard, tending to her night-blooming moon garden, and conjuring the grace and gravity of nature in lambent oil paintings in her art studio. Her adolescent reverence for the natural world has since evolved into an earth-based spirituality that draws from tarot, eco-feminism, and astrology. The vibrant, joyful force she once saw in pillbugs and river rocks, she now recognizes as her higher power, a spirit goddess that both resides within her and binds her to the vast cosmic unity of all things.

“I feel most connected to spirit when I’m in nature with my feet on the earth, my hands in the soil,” explained Barker. “Touching plants is so sensuous; there’s this very generous feeling about it, a flow and ease that I’m trying to move toward whenever I can.” This search for ease and solace is also what leads Barker back to her studio time and again. Before a canvas and among her many palettes of paints, she again feels connected to herself, her spirit, and the living heart of things. Though the raw materials are different, gardening and painting share a common design: to realize the latent potential in dirt or pigment through rapt attention and skillful gesture. Just as sterling silver roses bloom in her garden, so do their painterly counterparts on her canvases. Both processes entail endurance, compassion, and a willingness to engage with the unknown.  

Barker most often paints the plants and trees around her home in Echo Park, seldom representing places she hasn’t spent considerable time contemplating. Rather, cultivating an intimate relationship with her subjects over days, months, or years is an integral part of her creative process.“There’s a period of really getting to know what I’m about to paint,” Barker said. “Observing it daily and learning how it changes, grows, adapts.” Her paintings are then less representations of a single moment in time and more distillations of her subject's continuous transformation beneath morning light and purple twilight, through spring and fall, growth and deterioration, death and new life.

The mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd once wrote that a “place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered.” Barker’s paintings evince this observation in more ways than one. Her relationship with her surroundings and her surroundings’ relationship with her deepen and develop reciprocally. Neither party is compelled by domination or subjugation. Contrary to the art-historical tradition of landscape painters that privileged explicit and mappable representations, aiding and abetting acts of possession, Barker embraces all that’s evanescent, elusive, and ambiguous.

Her talent for collapsing long periods of slow looking into instantaneous revelations affords the compositions their immediacy. Standing before them recalls the experience of stepping from a dimly lit interior into the sun that first blinds then clarifies, burning off layers of familiarity and revealing the essential brilliance of things beneath. To this extent, they monumentalize the temporary shock of having one’s eyes opened to the world anew while illuminating something about the essence of a place, of what endures beyond the human gaze. By conjoining the enduring and the ephemeral, she imbues her work with an atemporal, almost allegorical quality. The singularity of a Los Angeles garden in 2024 becomes a portal through which it's possible to comprehend a more ubiquitous truth about the nature of reality or perhaps the reality of nature.

The confluent centripetal and centrifugal forces, toward and away from temporal and geographical specificity, cast the landscapes into continuous states of fluctuation. The world on the canvas, like the one beyond its frame, is in the midst of becoming. Envisaging her subjects during liminal periods further emphasizes this sense of ongoingness, gesturing to the past while suggesting the future. Translucent glazes, rubbed-through pigments, and sudden patches of exposed linen suspend light and shadow in uneasy equipoise. Straddling the thin veil of dawn and the velvety scrim of dusk, the landscapes appear to flicker back and forth, revealing something of themselves in both simultaneously. In this way, she addresses the stability of form, its liability to change, and the possibilities for variance and nuance between states.

In most of her paintings, it's nearly impossible to discern the time of day definitively. An inky blue sky might fill in behind sun-soaked branches and luminescent blossoms, or the top of a frame might appear adumbral while the foreground is bathed in crisp, clear daylight. Other times, the waxing and waning light distorts or enhances hues into otherworldly intensities, relegating the tableaus to the realm of nightmare and fantasy. The ambiguity draws the viewer closer to the picture plane and asks them to discern what’s happening or about to take place. By privileging irresolution, Barker asserts the need for imagination and investment on the part of the viewer. “I’m interested in helping people to engage differently, to discover something of themselves in the painting,” she explained.

Barker formally mirrors this oscillation between familiarity and estrangement in the lyrical exchange between fine-line renderings and abstract gestures. Lively dabs, fine sgraffito, brushy smudges, and aqueous washes cohere in precise figurations or else deliquesce into ethereal emanations. The juxtaposition of the two modes of mark-making emphasizes the relationship between part and whole. Delicate delineations define a single plant, yet when enveloped in stumbling, rollicking contours and fluid strokes, they act together to suggest the entire all-encompassing forest.

Using tiny brushes, Barker draws the delicate venation pattern on milkweed, the elegant jigsaws of pine bark, or the plush corolla of a dahlia. Where the lines accumulate in intricate patterns and illustrative pictorialism, the objects take on a weight and materiality unto themselves. Despite the absence of built-up surface textures, the formal density produces a convincing haptic sensation; one can imagine the tender touch of a voluptuous petal or the scratch of a scrubby bramble. The exacting details bespeak the artist's dedication to preserving that which is itself sublime: its design, complexity, and beauty, a source of wonder and delight.

Elsewhere, the colors overflow the lines and, like dye dripped in water, expand outward into swirling flourishes and diffuse washes. Dabs and splotches unmoored from the confines of representation slip between matter, sometimes floating, streaming, or gathering in the suggestion of shadow, the ghost of solidity. Here, the colors press against one another, shaping and making each other. There’s a jouissance, or sense of bliss, to the fluid meetings, partings, and coalescences of tone, texture, and shape. Certain dappled flurries of paint evoke phenomena like sunlight sparkling across a rippling stream or filtering through the shifting leaves of trees. Elsewhere, the loose brushy strokes recall fog dissolving or the movements of wind through otherwise static scenes. 

As the compositions advance gracefully toward empirical knowability and retreat, receding like the tide back into the sea and its obdurate mystery, one can imagine the artist negotiating between astute observation and sensual intuition. Where abstraction prevails, it registers less like the artist abandoning her fidelity to nature and more like a shift in her mode of relating from rational to emotional, from attending to the remarkable structural integrity of bark to exploring the splendor and solace of the connections among trunk, earth, and roots. While she has one eye trained on the way the sun gilds the dozing cats' brindled fir, the other is turned inward, recording how the exchange mends the heart, enlivens the mind, and recalls the spirit to the body. “It’s a dance between the two, but they definitely live in an emotional place,” explained Barker. “I most want people to feel the work with their hearts, to feel that magic, mysterious connection I feel.”

The resolution of perceiving and feeling in perfect unity conjures the ineffable yet irrefutable mystical presence in Barker’s paintings. Like her Goddess, this specter paradoxically transcends the world and the hegemony of human understanding yet reverberates in every fiber of every living thing.“I feel the paintings in my hands wanting to come out, the Goddess’s presence in them when they do,” she explained. The aura of spirituality recalls what Hilma af Klint referred to as a secret growing. “Just as invisible hands help and tend every plant on this green earth, so every budding sprout of goodness is tended and shaped and protected by invisible powers,” wrote af Klint to a friend whose art was not sprouting at the rate she hoped. “When the time comes, your eyes will open, and you too will see the beautiful plant that grew in secrecy.”

It is readily apparent that Barker sees secret things. While her process begins with careful observation and photography, once inside her studio, her approach to applying paint to canvas is highly intuitive, spiritually attuned, and mysterious even to her. She prefers to paint early in the morning in order to maintain a connection to her dream state and the inner workings of her unconscious. “This work is about my spirit and what’s happening inside of me,” she explained. “It’s about mysticism, time, healing, and this beautiful energy all around us.”  Before she begins painting, she’ll put on a song, sing, and dance, bringing her attention and awareness into her body. Then, she spreads five or six color palettes across a row of folding tables for easy access.

Because Barker has synesthesia, she experiences color as symphonic, with each shade having a distinctive resonance. “Working with colors is like playing the piano; I try to let the energy guide me,” said the artist. Barker attributes some of her willingness to improvise and experiment to her lack of formal training as a painter. The countless shades—washes, hints, suggestions, arabesques, occasions, tinges, dreams—of green found across her canvases are the result of her intuitive color mixing. The full spectrum of chromatic light seems to unfurl beneath her brush, opening itself to be explored in greater degrees of trace and nuance. In each shade of green, an entire world of greens.

Like her ‘artistic fairy godmother’ Pierre Bonnard, Barker has a keen understanding of color’s emotional agency and capacity to press against the limits of meaning. Both artists tend to fold seeing and feeling into forms that glow as if lit from within. Barker adapts and evolves Bonnard’s signature techniques: accenting with contrasting tracts of cool and warm shades, introducing chromatic gossamer veils, and rubbing layers of paint until they are incandescent. She shares a technical and conceptual affinity with Les Nabis—the movement to which Bonnard belonged—along with their primary inspiration, the Symbolist Paul Gauguin.

Central to Gauguin’s movement-defining aesthetic was his manipulation of the external world of flora and fauna to reflect his consciousness. He privileged the pure value of line and color moving across the plane above the realities of his surroundings. Heavy outlines, simplified shapes, and solid patches of supersaturated colors were his sui generis stylings. Though Barker imbues nature with a profound interiority and emotional potency, her practice deviates from Gauguin’s in balance and reciprocity. Where he may mask or compress his subjects, she meets or enlivens hers.

In spirit, Barker’s paintings are more in communion with Charles Burchfield’s hallucinatory watercolor landscapes and Georgia O’Keeffe’s transcendent portraits of anthropomorphic flowers. The performances and paintings of Ana Mendieta also inspired Barker, who chose to pursue her MFA at the University of Iowa, where Mendieta studied. Both artists embrace a ritualistic, mystical approach to merging the female body with the earth. Like Mendieta, Barker views art-making as a way of re-establishing the bond that unites her to the cosmic universe and engages with an array of esoteric and theological traditions to facilitate this connection.

“My paintings are prayers,” Barker explained. “I’m singing and moving my hands and moving color, love, and honor through my body, through energy and matter.” To whom are her prayers addressed? An immense, everpresent, nongendered spirit. Barker practices a queer-inclusive, intersectional feminist spirituality that rejects misogyny, racism, ableism, sizeism, and anything ruinous for the planet. Along with her art and gardening practices, she regularly engages in plant magic and rituals that align with the moon cycles. In a perfect synthesis of art, earth, and faith, Barker recently and strategically planted a garden where, depending on the moon’s size and shape, the night-blooming flowers shimmer silver and white against the night-black sky.

Though Barker identifies as a witch and has belonged to covens in the past, she is wary of labels that can’t possibly account for the experiences of living in her body. “As a human woman person, this body has changed me and has been changed by me,” she explained. For Barker, who’s endured trauma and severe illness, nature’s miraculous capacity to heal the heart and reconnect the corporal to the psyche can not be overstated. She understands physical embodiment enabled by a collective rejection of dissociation and technological intervention as our species’ best chance at healing our world and supporting our continued existence. “When we stop being connected to our bodies, we treat everything as objects instead of as subjects…that’s what got us here,” she explained.

A return to embodiment precipitates presence, attention, and reconnection. Restoring responsive contact with the vast, shared consciousness uniting all entities across the universe revitalizes our sense of purpose, belonging, and responsibility. As with Barker's compositions, the whole transcends the sum of its parts. “Get to know a rose, show up, bring care and attention daily to that plant, recognize that you’re both part of this greater family,” Barker encourages. “Because the way we live day to day in our bodies has real spiritual, physical, and energetic meaning for the community, the world, and the survival of this planet.”

To truly behold one of Barker’s paintings is to feel that line of interrelating energy binding you to spiders, lemon-scented gum trees, bumble bees, dahlias, sublime mountain peaks, Georgia O’Keeffe, jimsonweed, poetry, ice cream, ancient melodies, a little girl playing in a stream, hawks, the ever-shifting shades of green—to the great-non-gendered-goddess, to the artist in her studio praying with paint, to the hand-drawn note taped to the artist’s wall, asking does it vibrate? —Tara Anne Dalbow