Jo Barnard Artist - Biography Jo Barnard is a South African artist whose work is strongly influenced by her many business trips to China and the Far East. While she was always drawn to watercolours, it was the sumi-e method that she found exhilarating and challenging. Sumi-e, sometimes known as black ink or ink wash painting, has its roots in Chinese calligraphy, with the paintings being considered as tangible poetry, expressing the artist's spiritual connection and balance with the universe. Barnard was fortunate to have received training in this demanding technique as well watercolour classes from a Chinese master painter, who taught her how to blend Eastern and Western styles. While this technique of watercolour is slow and painstaking, the overall effect that Barnard achieves is of spontaneity and immediacy. It is here that she particularly excels, as not only does she capture the appearance of her subjects at a moment in time, she captures their spirit, their essence of being. Barnard uses the most delicate stains and hints of colour in her work. The suggestive but fragile lines of these translucent studies often have the leitmotif of water, presenting it as habitat, or possibly the essential component of being. But she includes flowers like peonies in her repertoire, not only fish, turtles and water birds such as egrets, penguins and cranes. She has a master’s touch in combining colour, line and shading, giving the effect of multiple layers, as one is drawn from the surface of the painting, deeper and deeper into the scene depicted. There are no solid blocks of colour or shape: this inconsistency and juxtaposition suggest not only the sometimes erratic movement of water, but the transience of each subject or scene and, indeed life itself. And the shifting colourscape hints at the dappled effects of light on water, and its constant movement. For all their intricacies, Barnard’s works are clean and simple, making as much use of empty space as they do of detail and colour: a powerful combination. She has shown herself to be totally in control of her subject and her method.